A Thief of Time

A THIEF OF TIME

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Tony Hillerman

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the ninth Leaphorn & Chee Navajo mystery

Contents

|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14|15|16|17|18|19|

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

HarperPaperbacks

A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers

Copyright Š 1988 by Tony Hillerman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollinsPublishers,

East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022.

A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1988 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.

Cover illustration by Peter Thorpe

Map by Mario Ferro, based on a design by David Lindroth

First HarperPaperbacks printing: January 1990

Printed in the United States of America

With special thanks to Dan Murphy of the U.S. Park Service for pointing me to the ruins down the San Juan River, to Charley and Susan DeLorme and the other river lovers of Wild River Expeditions, to Kenneth Tsosie of White Horse Lake, to Ernie Bulow, and to the Tom and Jan Vaughn family of Chaco Culture National Historical Park. All characters in this book are imaginary. True, Drayton and Noi Vaughn actually do make the sixty-mile bus ride to school each morning but they are even classier in real life than the fictitious counterparts found herein.

This story is dedicated to Steven Lovato,

firstborn son of Larry and Mary Lovato.

May he always go with beauty all around him.

Chapter One

^ ť

THE MOON HAD RISEN just above the cliff behind her. Out on the packed sand of the wash bottom the shadow of the walker made a strange elongated shape. Sometimes it suggested a heron, sometimes one of those stick-figure forms of an Anasazi pictograph. An animated pictograph, its arms moving rhythmically as the moon shadow drifted across the sand. Sometimes, when the goat trail bent and put the walker's profile against the moon, the shadow became Kokopelli himself. The backpack formed the spirit's grotesque hump, the walking stick Kokopelli's crooked flute. Seen from above, the shadow would have made a Navajo believe that the great yei northern clans called Watersprinkler had taken visible form. If an Anasazi had risen from his thousand-year grave in the trash heap under the cliff ruins here, he would have seen the Humpbacked Flute Player, the rowdy god of fertility of his lost people. But the shadow was only the shape of Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal blocking out the light of an October moon.

Dr. Friedman-Bernal rested now, sitting on a convenient rock, removing her backpack, rubbing her shoulders, letting the cold, high desert air evaporate the sweat that had soaked her shirt, reconsidering a long day.

No one could have seen her. Of course, they had seen her driving away from Chaco. The children were up in the gray dawn to catch their school bus. And the children would chat about it to their parents. In that tiny, isolated Park Service society of a dozen adults and two children, everyone knew everything about everybody. There was absolutely no possibility of privacy. But she had done everything right. She had made the rounds of the permanent housing and checked with everyone on the digging team. She was driving into Farmington, she'd said. She'd collected the outgoing mail to be dropped off at the Blanco Trading Post. She had jotted down the list of supplies people needed. She'd told Maxie she had the Chaco fever--needed to get away, see a movie, have a restaurant dinner, smell exhaust fumes, hear a different set of voices, make phone calls back to civilization on a telephone that would actually work. She would spend a night where she could hear the sounds of civilization, something besides the endless Chaco silence. Maxie was sympathetic. If Maxie suspected anything, she suspected Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal was meeting Lehman. That would have been fine with Eleanor Friedman-Bernal.

The handle of the folding shovel she had strapped to her pack was pressing against her back. She stopped, shifted the weight, and adjusted the pack straps. Somewhere in the darkness up the canyon she could hear the odd screeching call of a saw-whet owl, hunting nocturnal rodents. She glanced at her watch: 10:11, changing to 10:12 as she watched. Time enough.

No one had seen her in Bluff. She was sure of that. She had called from Shiprock, just to make doubly sure that no one was using Bo Arnold's old house out on the highway. No one had answered. The house was dark when she'd arrived, and she'd left it that way, finding the key under the flower box where Bo always left it. She'd done her borrowing carefully, disturbing nothing. When she put it back, Bo would never guess it had been missing. Not that it would matter. Bo was a biologist, scraping out a living as a part-timer with the Bureau of Land Management while he finished his dissertation on desert lichens, or whatever it was he was studying. He hadn't given a damn about anything else when she'd known him at Madison, and he didn't now.

She yawned, stretched, reached for her backpack, decided to rest a moment longer. She'd been up about nineteen hours. She had maybe two more to go before she reached the site. Then she'd roll out the sleeping bag and not get out of it until she was rested. No hurry now. She thought about Lehman. Big. Ugly. Smart. Gray. Sexy. Lehman was coming. She'd wine him and dine him and show him what she had. And he would have to be impressed. He'd have to agree she'd proved her case. That wasn't necessary for publication--his approval. But for some reason, it was necessary to her. And that irrationality made her think of Maxie. Maxie and Elliot.

She smiled, and rubbed her face. It was quiet here, just a few insects making their nocturnal sounds. Windless. The cold air settling into the canyon. She shivered, picked up the backpack, and struggled into it. A coyote was barking somewhere over on Comb Wash far behind her. She could hear another across the wash, very distant, yipping in celebration of the moonlight. She walked rapidly up the packed sand, lifting her legs high to stretch them, not thinking of what she would do tonight. She had thought long enough of that. Perhaps too long. Instead she thought of Maxie and Elliot. Brains, both. But nuts. The Blueblood and the Poorjane. The Man Who Could Do Anything obsessed by the woman who said nothing he did counted. Poor Elliot! He could never win.

A flash of lightning on the eastern horizon-- much too distant to hear the thunder and the wrong direction to threaten any rain. A last gasp of summer, she thought. The moon was higher now, its light muting the colors of the canyon into shades of gray. Her thermal underwear and the walking kept her body warm but her hands were like ice. She studied them. No hands for a lady. Nails blunt and broken. The skin tough, scarred, callused. Anthropology skin, they'd called it when she was an undergraduate. The skin of people who are always out under the sun, working in the dirt. It had always bothered her mother, as everything about her bothered her mother. Becoming an anthropologist instead of a doctor, and then not marrying a doctor. Marrying a Puerto Rican archaeologist who was not even Jewish. And then losing him to another woman. 'Wear gloves,' her mother had said. 'For heaven's sake, Ellie, you have hands like a dirt farmer.'

And a face like a dirt farmer too, she'd thought.

The canyon was just as she remembered from the summer she had helped map and catalog its sites. A great place for pictographs. Just ahead, just beyond the cottonwoods on the sheer sandstone wall where the canyon bottom bent, was a gallery of them. The baseball gallery, they called it, because of the great shaman figure that someone had thought resembled a cartoon version of an umpire.

The moon lit only part of the wall, and the slanting light made it difficult to see, but she stopped to inspect it. In this light, the tapered, huge-shouldered shape of the mystic Anasazi shaman lost its color and became merely a dark form. Above it a clutter of shapes danced, stick figures, abstractions: the inevitable Kokopelli, his humped shape bent, his flute pointed almost at the ground; a heron flying; a heron standing; the zigzag band of pigment representing a snake. Then she noticed the horse.

It stood well to the left of the great baseball shaman, mostly in moon shadow. A Navajo addition, obviously, since the Anasazi had vanished three hundred years before the Spanish came on their steeds. It was a stylized horse, with a barrel body and straight legs, but without the typical Navajo tendency to build beauty into everything they attempted. The rider seemed to be a Kokopelli--Watersprinkler, the Navajos called him. At least the rider seemed to be blowing a flute. Had this addition been there before? She couldn't remember. Such Navajo additions weren't uncommon. But this one puzzled her.

Then she noticed, at each of three feet of the animal, a tiny prone figure. Three. Each with the little circle representing the head separated from the body. Each with one leg cut away.

Sick. And they hadn't been here four years ago. These she would have remembered.

For the first time Eleanor Friedman-Bernal became aware of the darkness, the silence, her total isolation. She had dropped her backpack while she rested. Now she picked it up, put an arm through the carry strap, changed her mind. She unzipped a side pocket and extracted the pistol. It was a .25 caliber automatic. The salesman had shown her how to load it, how the safety worked, how to hold it. He had told her it was accurate, easy to use, and made in Belgium. He had not told her that it took an unusual ammunition that one always had to hunt for. She had never tried it out in Madison. There never seemed to be a place to shoot it safely. But when she came to New Mexico, the first day when there was enough wind to blow away the sound, she'd driven out into the emptiness on the road toward Crownpoint and practiced with it. She had fired it at rocks, and dead-wood, and shadows on the sand, until it felt natural and comfortable and she was hitting things, or getting close enough. When she used up most of the box of cartridges, she found the sporting goods store in Farmington didn't have them. And neither did the big place in Albuquerque, and finally she had ordered them out of a catalog. Now she had seventeen bullets left in the new box. She had brought six of them with her. A full magazine. The pistol felt cold in her hand, cold and hard and reassuring.

She dropped it into the pocket of her jacket. As she regained the sandy bottom of the wash and walked up it, she was conscious of the heaviness against her hip. The coyotes were closer, two of them somewhere above her, on the mesa beyond the clifftops. Sometimes the night breeze gusted enough to make its sounds in the brush along the bottom, rattling the leaves on the Russian olives and whispering through the fronds of the tamarisks. Usually it was still. Runoff from the summer monsoons had filled pools along the rocky bottom. Most of these were nearly dry now, but she could hear frogs, and crickets, and insects she couldn't identify. Something made a clicking sound in the darkness where dead tumbleweed had collected against the cliff, and from somewhere ahead she heard what sounded like a whistle. A night bird?

The canyon wound under the cliff and out of the moonlight. She turned on her flash. No risk of anyone seeing it. And that turned her thoughts to how far the nearest human would be. Not far as the bird flies--perhaps fifteen or twenty miles as the crow flew. But no easy way in. No roads across the landscape of almost solid stone, and no reason to build roads. No reason for the Anasazi to come here, for that matter, except to escape something that was hunting them. None that the anthropologists could think of--not even the cultural anthropologists with their notorious talents for forming theories without evidence. But come they had. And with them came her artist. Leaving Chaco Canyon behind her. Coming here to create more of her pots and to die.

From where Dr. Friedman-Bernal was walking she could see one of their ruins low on the cliff wall to her right. Had it been daylight, she remembered, she could have seen two more in the huge amphitheater alcove on the cliff to her left. But now the alcove was black with shadow--looking a little like a great gaping mouth.

She heard squeaking. Bats. She'd noticed a few just after sundown. Here they swarmed, fluttering over places where runoff had filled potholes and potholes had bred insects. They flashed past her face, just over her hair. Watching them, Ellie Friedman-Bernal didn't watch where she was walking. A rock turned under her foot, and she lost her balance.

The backpack cost her enough of her usual grace to make the fall hard and clumsy. She broke it with her right hand, hip, and elbow and found herself sprawled on the stream bottom, hurt, shocked, and shaken.

The elbow was most painful. It had scraped over the sandstone, tearing her shirt and leaving an abrasion that, when she touched it, stained her finger with blood. Then her bruised hip got her attention, but it was numb now and would punish her later. It was only when she scrambled back to her feet that she noticed the cut across the palm of her hand. She examined it in the light of her flash, made a sympathetic clicking sound, and then sat down to deal with it.

She picked out a bit of the gravel imbedded in the heel of her hand, rinsed the cut from her canteen, and bandaged it with a handkerchief, using left hand and teeth to tighten the knot. And then she continued up the wash, more careful now, leaving the bats behind, following a turn back into the full moonlight and then another into the shadows. Here she climbed onto a low alluvial ledge beside the dry streambed and dumped her pack. It was a familiar place. She and Eduardo Bernal had pitched a tent here five summers ago when they were graduate students, lovers, and part of the site-mapping team. Eddie Bernal. Tough little Ed. Fun while it lasted. But not much fun for long. Soon, surely before Christmas, she would drop the hyphen. Ed would hardly notice. A sigh of relief, perhaps. End of that brief phase when he'd thought one woman would be enough.

She removed a rock, some sticks, smoothed the ground with the edge of her boot sole, dug out and softened an area where her hips would be, and then rolled out the sleeping bag. She chose the place where she had lain with Eddie. Why? Partly defiance, partly sentiment, partly because it was simply the most comfortable spot. Tomorrow would be hard work and the cuts on her palm would make digging difficult and probably painful. But she wasn't ready for sleep yet. Too much tension. Too much uneasiness.

Standing here beside the sleeping bag, out of the moonlight, more stars were visible. She checked the autumn constellations, found the polestar, got her directions exactly right. Then she stared across the wash into the darkness that hid what she and Eddie had called Chicken Condo. In the narrow stone alcove, Anasazi families had built a two-story dwelling probably big enough for thirty people. Above it, in another alcove so hidden that they wouldn't have noticed it had Eddie not wondered where an evening bat flight was coming from, the Anasazi had built a little stone fort reachable only by a precarious set of hand- and footholds. It was around the lower dwelling that Eleanor Friedman-Bernal first had found the peculiar potsherds. If her memory didn't fool her. It was there, when it was light enough tomorrow, that she would dig. In violation of Navajo law, of federal law, and of professional ethics. If her memory only had not fooled her. And now she had more evidence than just her memory.

She couldn't wait until daylight. Not now. Not this near. Her flashlight would be enough to check.

Her memory had been excellent. It took her unerringly and without a misstep on an easy climb up the talus slope and along the natural pathway to the rim. There she paused and turned her light onto the cliff. The petroglyphs were exactly as she had stored them in her mind. The spiral that might represent the sipapu from which humans had emerged from the womb of Mother Earth, the line of dots that might represent the clan's migrations, the wide-shouldered forms that the ethnographers believed represented kachina spirits. There, too, cut through the dark desert varnish into the face of the cliff, was the shape Eddie had called Big Chief looking out from behind a red-stained shield, and a figure that seemed to have a man's body but the feet and head of a heron. It was one of her two favorites, because it seemed so totally unexplainable even by the cultural anthropologists--who could explain anything. The other was another version of Kokopelli.

Wherever you found him--and you found him everywhere these vanished people carved, and painted, their spirits into the cliffs of the Southwest--Kokopelli looked about the same. His humpbacked figure was supported by stick legs. Stick arms held a straight line to his tiny round head, making him seem to be playing a clarinet. The flute might be pointed down, or ahead. Otherwise there was little variation in how he was depicted. Except here. Here Kokopelli was lying on his back, flute pointed skyward. 'At last,' Eddie had said. 'You have found Kokopelli's home. This is where he sleeps.'

But Eleanor Friedman-Bernal hardly glanced at Kokopelli now. The Chicken Condo was just around the corner. That was what had drawn her.

The first things her eyes picked up when the beam of her flash lit the total darkness of the alcove were flecks of white where nothing white should be. She let the flash roam over the broken walls, reflect from the black surface of the seep-fed pool below them. Then she moved the beam back to that incongruous reflection. It was exactly what she had feared. Bones. Bones scattered everywhere. 'Oh, shit!' said Eleanor Friedman-Bernal, who almost never used expletives. 'Shit! Shit! Shit!'

Someone had been digging. Someone had been looting. A pot hunter. A Thief of Time. Someone had gotten here first.

She focused on the nearest white. A human shoulder bone. A child's. It lay atop a pile of loose earth just outside a place where the wall had fallen. The excavation was in the hump of earth that had been this community's trash heap. The common place for burials, and the first place experienced pot hunters dug. But the hole here was small. She felt better. Perhaps not much damage had been done. The digging looked fresh. Perhaps what she was hunting would still be here. She explored with the flash, looking for other signs of digging. She found none.

Nor was there any sign of looting elsewhere. She shined the light into the single hole dug in the midden pile. It reflected off stones, a scattering of potsherds mixed with earth and what seemed to be more human bones -- part of a foot, she thought, and a vertebra. Beside the pit, on a slab of sandstone, four lower jaws had been placed in a neat row -- three adult, one not much beyond infancy. She frowned at the arrangement, raised her eyebrows. Considered. Looked around her again. It hadn't rained -- at least no rain had blown into this sheltered place -- since this dig had been done. But then when had it rained? Not for weeks at Chaco. But Chaco was almost two hundred miles east and south.

The night was still. Behind her, she heard the odd piping of the little frogs that seemed to thrive in this canyon wherever water collected. Leopard frogs, Eddie had called them. And she heard the whistle again. The night bird. Closer now. A half-dozen notes. She frowned. A bird? What else could it be? She had seen at least three kinds of lizards on her way from the river -- a whiptail, and a big collared lizard, and another she couldn't identify. They were nocturnal. Did they make some sort of mating whistle?

At the pool, her flashlight reflected scores of tiny points of light -- the eyes of frogs. She stood watching them as they hopped, panicked by her huge presence, toward the safety of the black water. Then she frowned. Something was strange.

Not six feet from where she stood, one of them had fallen back in midhop. Then she noticed another one, a half-dozen others. She squatted on her heels beside the frog, inspecting it. And then another, and another, and another.

They were tethered. A whitish thread--perhaps a yucca fiber--had been tied around a back leg of each of these tiny black-green frogs and then to a twig stuck into the damp earth.

Eleanor Friedman-Bernal leaped to her feet, flashed the light frantically around the pool. Now she could see the scores of panicked frogs making those odd leaps that ended when a tether jerked them back to earth. For seconds her mind struggled to process this crazy, unnatural, irrational information. Who would… ? It would have to be a human act. It could have no sane purpose. When? How long could these frogs live just out of reach of the saving water? It was insane.

Just then she heard the whistle again. Just behind her. Not a night bird. No sort of reptile. It was a melody the Beatles had made popular. 'Hey, Jude,' the words began. But Eleanor didn't recognize it. She was too terrified by the humped shape that was coming out of the moonlight into this pool of darkness.

Chapter Two

Ť ^ ť

'ELEANOR FRIEDMAN HYPHEN BERNAL.' Thatcher spaced the words, pronouncing them evenly. 'I'm uneasy about women who hyphenate their names.'

Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn didn't respond. Had he ever met a hyphenated woman? Not that he could remember. But the custom seemed sensible to him. Not as odd as Thatcher's discomfort with it. Leaphorn's mother, Leaphorn's aunts, all of the women he could think of among his maternal Red Forehead clan, would have resisted the idea of submerging their name or family identity in that of a husband. Leaphorn considered mentioning that, and didn't feel up to it. He'd been tired when Thatcher had picked him up at Navajo Tribal Police headquarters. Now he had added approximately 120 miles of driving to that fatigue. From Window Rock through Yah-Ta-Hey, to Crownpoint, to those final twenty jarring dirt miles to the Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Leaphorn's inclination had been to turn down the invitation to come along. But Thatcher had asked him as a favor.

'First job as a cop since they trained me,' Thatcher had said. 'May need some advice.' It wasn't that, of course. Thatcher was a confident man and Leaphorn understood why Thatcher had called him. It was the kindness of an old friend who wanted to help. And the alternative to going would be to sit on the bed in the silent room and finish sorting through what was left of Emma's things--deciding what to do with them. 'Sure,' Leaphorn had said. 'Be a nice ride.' Now they were in the Chaco visitors' center, sitting on the hard chairs, waiting for the right person to talk to. From the bulletin board, a face stared out at them through dark sunglasses. A THIEF OF TIME, the legend above it said. POT HUNTERS DESTROY AMERICA'S PAST.

'Appropriate,' Thatcher said, nodding toward the poster, 'but the picture should be a crowd scene. Cowboys, and county commissioners, and schoolteachers and pipeline workers, and everybody big enough to handle a shovel.' He glanced at Leaphorn, looking for a response, and sighed.

'That road,' he said. 'I've been driving it thirty years now and it never gets any better.' He glanced at Leaphorn again.

'Yeah,' Leaphorn said. Thatcher had called them ceramic chugholes. 'Never gets wet enough to soften `em up,' he'd said. 'Rains, the bumps just get greasy.'' Not quite true. Leaphorn remembered a night a lifetime ago when he was young, a patrolman working out of the Crownpoint subagency. Melting snow had made the Chaco chugholes wet enough to soften the ceramic. His patrol car had sunk into the sucking, bottomless caliche mud. He'd radioed Crownpoint but the dispatcher had no help to send him. So he'd walked two hours to the R.D. Ranch headquarters. He'd been a newlywed then, worried that Emma would be worried about him. A hand at the ranch had put chains on a four-wheel-drive pickup and pulled him out. Nothing had changed since then. Except the roads were a lifetime older. Except Emma was dead.

Thatcher had said something else. He had been looking at him, expecting some response, when he should have been watching the ruts.

Leaphorn had nodded.

'You weren't listening. I asked you why you decided to quit.'

Leaphorn had said nothing for a while. 'Just tired.'

Thatcher had shaken his head. 'You're going to miss it.'

'No, you get older. Or wiser. You realize it doesn't really make any difference.'

'Emma was a wonderful woman,' Thatcher had told him. 'This won't bring her back.'

'No, it won't.'

'She were alive, she'd say: Joe, don't quit.' She'd say, 'You can't quit living. I've heard her say things just like that.'

'Probably,' Leaphorn had said. 'But I just don't want to do it anymore.'

'Okay,' Thatcher drove awhile. 'Change the subject. I think women who have hyphenated names like that are going to be rich. Old-money rich. Hard to work with. Stereotyping, but it's the way my mind works.'

Then Leaphorn had been saved from thinking of something to say to that by an unusually jarring chughole. Now he was saved from thinking about it again. A medium-sized man wearing a neatly pressed U.S. Park Service uniform emerged from the doorway marked PERSONNEL ONLY. He walked into the field of slanting autumn sunlight streaming through the windows of the visitors' center. He looked at them curiously.

'I'm Bob Luna,' he said. 'This is about Ellie?'

Thatcher extracted a leather folder from his jacket and showed Luna a Bureau of Land Management law enforcement badge. 'L. D. Thatcher,' he said. 'And this is Lieutenant Leaphorn. Navajo Tribal Police. Need to talk to Ms. Friedman-Bernal.' He pulled an envelope from his jacket pocket. 'Have a search warrant here to take a look at her place.'

Luna's expression was puzzled. At first glance he had looked surprisingly young to Leaphorn to be superintendent of such an important park--his round, good-humored face would be perpetually boyish. Now, in the sunlight, the networks of lines around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth were visible. The sun and aridity of the Colorado Plateau acts quickly on the skin of whites, but it takes time to deepen the furrows. Luna was older than he looked.

'Talk to her?' Luna said. 'You mean she's here? She's come back?'

Now it was Thatcher's turn to be surprised. 'Doesn't she work here?'

'But she's missing,' Luna said. 'Isn't that what you're here about? We reported it a week ago. More like two weeks.'

'Missing?' Thatcher said. 'Whadaya mean missing?'

Luna's face had become slightly flushed. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Inhaled. Young as he looked, Luna was superintendent of this park, which meant he had a lot of experience being patient with people.

'Week ago last Wednesday--That would be twelve days ago, we called in and reported Ellie missing. She was supposed to be back the previous Monday. She hadn't showed up. Hadn't called. She'd gone into Farmington for the weekend. She had an appointment Monday evening, back out here, and hadn't showed up for that. Had another appointment Wednesday. Hadn't been here for that, either. Totally out of character. Something must have happened to her and that's what we reported.'

'She's not here?' Thatcher said. He tapped the envelope with the search warrant in it against the palm of his hand.

'Who'd you call?' Leaphorn asked, surprised at himself even as he heard himself asking the question. This was none of his business. It was nothing he cared about. He was here only because Thatcher had wanted him to come. Had wheedled until it was easier, if you didn't care anyway, to come than not to come. He hadn't intended to butt in. But this floundering around was irritating.

'The sheriff,' Luna said.

'Which one?' Leaphorn asked. Part of the park was in McKinley County, part in San Juan.

'San Juan County,' Luna said. 'At Farmington. Anyway, nobody came out. So we called again last Friday. When you showed up, I thought you'd come out to start looking into it.'

'I guess we are now,' Leaphorn said. 'More or less.'

'We have a complaint about her,' Thatcher said. 'Or rather an allegation. But very detailed, very specific. About violations of the Antiquities Preservation Protection Act.'

'Dr. Friedman?' Luna said. 'Dr. Friedman a pot hunter?' He grinned. The grin almost became a chuckle, but Luna suppressed it. 'I think we better go see Maxie Davis,' he said.

Luna did the talking as he drove them up the road along Chaco Wash. Thatcher sat beside him, apparently listening. Leaphorn looked out the window, at the late afternoon light on the broken sandstone surface of the Chaco cliffs, at the gray-silver tufts of grama grass on the talus slope, at the long shadow of Fajada Butte stretching across the valley. What will I do tonight, when I am back in Window Rock?

What will I do tomorrow? What will I do when this winter has come? And when it has gone? What will I ever do again?

Maxie is Eleanor Friedman's neighbor, Luna was saying. Next apartment in the housing units for temporary personnel. And both were part of the contract archaeology team. Helping decide which of the more than a thousand Anasazi sites in Luna's jurisdiction were significant, dating them roughly, completing an inventory, deciding which should be preserved for exploration in the distant future when scientists had new methods to see through time.

'And they're friends,' Luna said, 'They go way back. Went to school together. Work together now. All that. It was Maxie who called the sheriff.' Today Maxie Davis was working at BC129, which was the cataloging number assigned to an unexcavated Anasazi site. Unfortunately, Luna said, BC129 was on the wrong side of Chaco Mesa -- over by Escavada Wash at the end of a very rocky road.

'BC129?' Thatcher asked.

'BC129,' Luna repeated. 'Just a tag to keep track of it. Too many places out here to dream up names for them.'

BC129 was near the rim of the mesa, a low mound that overlooked the Chaco Valley. A woman, her short dark hair tucked under a cap stood waist-deep in a trench watching. Luna parked his van beside an old green pickup. Even at this distance Leaphorn could see the woman was beautiful. It was not just the beauty of youth and health, it was something unique and remarkable. Leaphorn had seen such beauty in Emma, nineteen then, and walking across the campus at Arizona State University. It was rare and valuable. A young Navajo man, his face shaded by the broad brim of a black felt hat, was sitting on the remains of a wall behind the trench, a shovel across his lap. Thatcher and Luna climbed out of the front seat.

'I'll wait,' Leaphorn said.

This was his new trouble. Lack of interest. It had been his trouble since his mind had reluctantly processed the information from Emma's doctor.

'There's no good way to tell this, Mr. Leaphorn,' the voice had said. 'We lost her. Just now. It was a blood clot. Too much infection. Too much strain. But if it's any consolation, it must have been almost instantaneous.'

He could see the man's face--pink-white skin, bushy blond eyebrows, blue eyes reflecting the cold light of the surgical waiting room through the lenses of horn-rimmed glasses, the small, prim mouth speaking to him. He could still hear the words, loud over the hum of the hospital air conditioner. It was like a remembered nightmare. Vivid. But he could not remember getting into his car in the parking lot, or driving through Gallup to Shiprock, or any of the rest of that day. He could remember only reviving his thoughts of the days before the operation. Emma's tumor would be removed. His joy that she was not being destroyed, as he had dreaded for so long, by the terrible, incurable, inevitable Alzheimer's disease. It was just a tumor. Probably not malignant. Easily curable. Emma would soon be herself again, memory restored. Happy. Healthy. Beautiful.

'The chances?' the surgeon had said. 'Very good. Better than ninety percent complete recovery. Unless something goes wrong, an excellent prognosis.'

But something had gone wrong. The tumor and its placement were worse than expected. The operation had taken much longer than expected. Then infection, and the fatal clot.

Since then, nothing had interested him. Someday, he would come alive again. Or perhaps he would. So far he hadn't. He sat sideways, legs stretched, back against the door, watching. Thatcher and Luna talked to the white woman in the trench. Unusual name for a woman. Maxie. Probably short for something Leaphorn couldn't think of. The Navajo was putting on a denim jacket, looking interested in whatever was being said, the expression on his long-jawed face sardonic. Maxie was gesturing, her face animated. She climbed out of the trench, walked toward the pickup truck with the Navajo following, his shovel over his shoulder in a sort of military parody. In the deep shadow of the hat brim Leaphorn saw white teeth. The man was grinning. Beyond him, the slanting light of the autumn afternoon outlined the contours of the Chaco Plateau with lines of darkness. The shadow of Fajada Butte stretched all the way across Chaco Wash now. Outside the shadow, the yellow of the cottonwood along the dry streambed glittered in the sun. They were the only trees in a tan-gray-silver universe of grass. (Where had they found their firewood, Leaphorn wondered, the vanished thousands of Old Ones who built these huge stone apartments? The anthropologists thought they'd carried the roof beams fifty miles on their shoulders from forests on Mount Taylor and the Chuskas--an incredible feat. But how did they boil their corn, roast venison, cure their pottery, and warm themselves in winter? Leaphorn remembered the hard labor each fall--his father and he taking their wagon into the foothills, cutting dead pinon and juniper, making the long haul back to their hogan. But the Anasazi had no horses, no wheels.)

Thatcher and Luna were back at the van now. Thatcher slammed the door on his coat, said something under his breath, reopened it and closed it again. When Luna started the engine the seat belt warning buzzed. 'Seat belt,' Thatcher said.

Luna fastened the seat belt. 'Hate these things,' he said.

The green pickup pulled ahead of them, raising dust.

'We're going down to look at what's-her-name's stuff,' Thatcher said, raising his voice for Leaphorn. 'This Ms. Davis doesn't think hyphenated could be a pot hunter. Said she collected pots, but it was for her work. Scientific. Legitimate. Said Ms… Ms. Bernal hated pot hunters.'

'Um,' Leaphorn said. He could see the big reservation hat of the young man through the back window of the pickup ahead. Odd to see a Navajo digging in the ruins. Stirring up Anasazi ghosts. Probably someone on the Jesus Road, or into the Peyote Church. Certainly a traditional man wouldn't be risking ghost sickness -- or even worse, the reputation of being a witch -- by digging among the bones. If you believed in the skinwalker traditions, bones of the dead made the tiny missiles that the witches shot into their victims. Leaphorn was not a believer. Those who were were the bane of his police work.

'She thinks something happened to Ms. Bernal,' Thatcher said, glancing in the rearview mirror at Leaphorn. 'You ought to have that seat belt on.'

'Yeah,' Leaphorn said. He fumbled it around him, thinking that probably nothing had happened to the woman. He thought of the anonymous call that had provoked this trip. There would be a connection, somewhere. One thing somehow would link Dr. What's-Her-Name's departure from Chaco with the motive for the call. The departure had led to the call, or something had happened that provoked both.

'What do you think?' he would have asked Emma. 'Woman takes off for Farmington and drops off the world. Two days later somebody nasty turns her in for stealing pots. It could be she'd done something to make him sore, and knew he'd find out about it and turn her in. So she took off. Or she went to Farmington, made him sore there, and took off. So what you think?'

And Emma would have asked him three or four questions, and found out how little he knew about the woman, or about anything else to do with this, and then she would have smiled at him and used one of those dusty aphorisms from her Bitter Water Clan.

'Only yearling coyotes think there's just one way to catch a rabbit,' she'd say. And then she'd say, 'About next Tuesday the woman will call and tell her friends she ran away and got married, and it won't have anything to do with stealing pots.' Maybe Emma would be right and maybe she'd be wrong, and that didn't really matter. It was a game they had played for years. Emma's astute mind working against his own intelligence, honing his thinking, testing his logic against her common sense. It helped him. She enjoyed it. It was fun.

Had been fun.

Leaphorn noticed it immediately -- the cold, stagnant air of abandoned places. He was standing beside Thatcher when Thatcher unlocked the door to the apartment of Dr. Friedman-Bernal and pushed it open. The trapped air flowed outward into Leaphorn's sensitive nostrils. He sensed dust in it, and all that mixture of smells which humans leave behind them when they go away.

The Park Service calls such apartments TPH, temporary personnel housing. At Chaco, six of them were built into an L-shaped frame structure on a concrete slab--part of a complex that included maintenance and storage buildings, the motor pool, and the permanent personnel housing: a line of eight frame bungalows backed against the low cliff of Chaco Mesa.

'Well,' Thatcher said. He walked into the apartment with Maxie Davis a step behind him. Leaphorn leaned against the door. Thatcher stopped. 'Ms. Davis,' he said, 'I'm going to ask you to wait outside for a while. Under this search warrant here… well, it makes everything different. I may have to take an oath on what was in here when I opened the door.' He smiled at her. 'Things like that.'

'I'll wait,' Maxie Davis said. She walked past Leaphorn, smiling at him nervously, and sat on the porch railing in the slanting sunlight. Her face was somber. Again, Leaphorn noticed her striking beauty. She was a small young woman. Cap off now, her dark hair needed combing. Her oval face had been burned almost as dark as Leaphorn's. She stared toward the maintenance yard, where a man in coveralls was doing something to the front end of a flatbed truck. Her fingers tapped at the railing--small, battered fingers on a small, scarred hand. Her blue work shirt draped against her back. Under it, every line of her body was tense. Beyond her the weedy yard, the maintenance shed, the tumbled boulders along the cliff, seemed almost luminous in the brilliant late-afternoon sunlight. It made the gloom inside Dr. Friedman-Bernal's apartment behind Leaphorn seem even more shadowy than it was.

Thatcher walked through the living room, pulled open the drapes and exposed sliding-glass doors. They framed Fajada Butte and the expanse of the Chaco Valley. Except for a stack of books on the coffee table in front of the bleak brown institutional sofa, the room looked unused. Thatcher picked up the top book, examined it, put it down, and walked into the bedroom. He stood just inside the doorway, shaking his head.

'It would help some,' he said, 'if you knew what the hell you're looking for.'

The room held a desk, two chairs, and two double beds. One seemed to be for sleeping-- the covers carelessly pulled back in place after its last use. The other was work space--covered now with three cardboard boxes and a litter of notebooks, computer printouts, and other papers. Beyond this bed other boxes lined the floor along the wall. They seemed to hold mostly broken bits of pottery. 'No way on God's green earth of telling where she got any of this stuff.” Thatcher said. 'Not that I know of. It might be perfectly legal.'

'Unless her field notes tell us something,' Leaphorn said. 'They might. In fact, if she collected that stuff as part of some project or other, they should tell exactly where she picked up every bit of that stuff. And it's going to be legal unless she's been selling the artifacts.'

'And of course if she's doing it for a project, it's legal,' Thatcher said. 'Unless she doesn't have the right permit. And if she's selling the stuff, she sure as hell ain't going to write down anything incriminating.'

'Nope,' Leaphorn said.

A man appeared at the apartment door. 'Finding anything?' he asked. He walked past Leaphorn without a glance and into the bedroom. 'Glad to see you people getting interested in this,' he said. 'Ellie's been missing almost three weeks now.'

Thatcher put a fragment of pot carefully back into its box. 'Who are you?' he asked.

'My name's Elliot,' he said. 'I work with Ellie on the Keet Katl dig. Or did work with her. What's this Luna's been telling me? You think she's stealing artifacts?'

Leaphorn found himself interested--wondering how Thatcher would deal with this. It wasn't the sort of thing anticipated and covered in the law enforcement training Thatcher would have received. No chapter covering intrusion of civilian into scene of investigation.

'Mr. Elliot,' Thatcher said, 'I want you to wait outside on the porch until we get finished in here. Then I want to talk to you.'

Elliot laughed. 'For God's sake,' he said, in a tone that canceled any misunderstanding the laugh might have caused. 'A woman vanishes for almost a month and nobody can get you guys off your butts. But somebody calls in with an anonymous…'

'Talk to you in a minute,' Thatcher said. 'Soon as I'm done in here.'

'Done what?' Elliot said. 'Done stirring through her potsherds? If you get `em out of order, get 'em mixed up, it will screw up everything for her.'

'Out,' Thatcher said, voice still mild.

Elliot stared at him.

Maybe middle thirties or a little older, Leap-horn thought. A couple of inches over six feet, slender, athletic. The sun had bleached his hair even lighter than its usual very light brown. His jeans were worn and so were his jean jacket and his boots. But they fit. They had been expensive. And the face fit the pattern--a little weatherbeaten but what Emma would have called 'an upper-class face.' A little narrow, large blue eyes, nothing crooked, nothing bent, nothing scarred. Not the face you'd see looking out of a truckload of migrant workers, or in a roofing crew, or the cab of a road grader.

'Of course this place is full of pots.' Elliot's voice was angry. 'Studying pots is Ellie's job--'

Thatcher gripped Elliot at the elbow. `Talk to you later,' he said mildly, and moved him past Leaphorn and out the door. He closed the door behind him.

'Trouble is,' Thatcher said, 'everything he says is true. Her business is pots. So she'll have a bunch of `em here. So what the hell are we looking for?'

Leaphorn shrugged. 'I think we just look,' he said. 'We find what we find. Then we think about it.'

They found more boxes of potsherds in the closet, each shard bearing a label that seemed to identify it with the place it had been found. They found an album of photographs, many of them snapshots of people who seemed to be anthropologists working at digs. There were three notebooks--two filled and one almost half filled--in which little pencil drawings of abstract patterns and pots were interposed with carbon rubbings of what they agreed must be the surface patterns of potsherds. The notes that surrounded these were in the special shorthand scientists develop to save themselves time.

'You studied this stuff at Arizona State,' Thatcher said. 'Can't you make it out?'

'I studied anthropology,' Leaphorn admitted. 'But mostly I studied cultural anthropology. This is a specialty and I didn't get into it. We went on a few digs in a Southwestern Anthro class, but the Anasazi culture wasn't my thing. Neither were ceramics.'

Among the papers on the bed were two Nelson's catalogs, both auctions of American Indian art, African art, and Oceanic art. Both facedown, both open to pages that featured illustrations of Mimbres, Hohokam, and Anasazi pots. Leaphorn studied them. The appraised prices ranged from $2,950 to $41,500 for a Mimbres urn. Two of the Anasazi ceramics had been circled in red in one catalog, and one in the other. The prices were $4,200, $3,700, and $14,500.

'Heard of Nelson's all my life,' Thatcher said. 'Thought they were just a London outfit. Just auctioned art, masterpieces, the Mono. Lisa, things like that.'

'This is art,' Leaphorn said.

'A painting is art,' Thatcher said. 'What kind of nut pays fourteen grand for a pot?' He tossed the catalog back on the bed.

Leaphorn picked it up.

The cover picture was a stylized re-creation of a pictograph--stick-figure Indians with lances riding horses with pipestem legs across a deerskin surface.

Across the top the legend read:

NELSON'S

FOUNDED 1744

Fine American Indian Art

New York Auction May 25 and 26

It opened easily to the pottery pages. Ten photographs of pots, each numbered and described in a numbered caption. Number 242 was circled in red. Leaphorn read the caption:

. Anasazi St. John's Polychrome bowl, circa A.D. 1000-1250, of deep rounded form, painted on the interior in rose with wavy pale 'ghost lines.' Has a geometric pattern enclosing two interlocked spirals. Two hatched, serrated rectangles below the rim. Interior surface serrated. Diameter 754 inches (19 cm). $4,000/$4,200.

Resale offer by an anonymous collector. Documentation.

Inside the scrawled red circle, the same pen had put a question mark over 'anonymous collector' and scribbled notations in the margin. What looked like a telephone number. Words that seemed to be names. 'Call Q!' 'See Houk.' Houk. The name made a faint echo in Leaphorn's mind. He'd known someone named Houk. The only notation that meant anything to him was: 'Nakai, Slick.' Leaphorn knew about Slick Nakai. Had met him a time or two. Nakai was a preacher. A fundamentalist Christian evangelist. He pulled a revival tent around the reservation in a trailer behind an old Cadillac sedan, putting it up here and there--exhorting those who came to hear him to quit drinking, leave off fornication, confess their sins, abandon their pagan ways, and come to Jesus. Leaphorn scanned the other names, looking for anything familiar, read the description of a Tonto Polychrome olla valued at $1,400/ $1,800. He put the catalog back on the bed. On the next page, a Mimbres black-on-white burial pot, with a 'kill hole' in its bottom and its exterior featuring lizards chasing lizards, was advertised for $38,600. Leaphorn grimaced and put down the catalog.

'I'm going to make a sort of rough inventory,' Thatcher said, sorting through one of the boxes. 'Just jot down some idea of what we have here, which we both know is absolutely nothing that is going to be of any use to us.'

Leaphorn sat in the swivel chair and looked at the 365-day calendar on the desk. It was turned to October 11. 'What day was it they said Dr. Hyphenated left here? Wasn't it the thirteenth?'

'Yeah,' Thatcher said.

Leaphorn flipped over a page to October 13. 'Do it!' was written under the date. He turned the next page. Across this was written: 'Away.' The next page held two notes: 'Be ready for Lehman. See H. Houk.'

H. Houk. Would it be Harrison Houk? Maybe. An unusual name, and the man fit the circumstances. Houk would be into everything and the Houk ranch--outside of Bluff and just over the San Juan River from the north side of the reservation--was in the heart of Anasazi ruins country.

The next page was October 16. It was blank. So was the next page. That took him to Wednesday. Across this was written: 'Lehman!!! about 4 P.M. dinner, sauerbraten, etc.'

Leaphorn thumbed through the pages up to the present. So far Dr. Friedman-Bernal had missed two other appointments. She would miss another one next week. Unless she came home.

He put down the calendar, walked into the kitchen, and opened the refrigerator, remembering how Emma liked to make sauerbraten. 'It's way too much work,' he would say, which was better than telling her that he really didn't like it very well. And Emma would say: 'No more work than Navajo tacos, and less cholesterol.'

The smell of soured milk and stale food filled his nostrils. The worse smell came from a transparent ovenware container on the top shelf. It held a Ziploc bag containing what seemed to be a large piece of meat soaking in a reddish brown liquid. Sauerbraten. Leaphorn grimaced, shut the door, and walked back into the room where Thatcher was completing his inventory.

The sun was on the horizon now, blazing through the window and casting Thatcher's shadow black against the wallpaper. Leaphorn imagined Eleanor Friedman-Bernal hurrying through the sauerbraten process, getting all those things now shriveled and spoiled lined up on the refrigerator shelves so that fixing dinner for Lehman could be quickly done. But she hadn't come back to fix that dinner. Why not?

Had she gone to see Harrison Houk about a pot? Leaphorn found himself remembering the first, and only, time he'd encountered the man. Years ago. He'd been what? Officer Leaphorn working out of the Kayenta substation, obliquely involved in helping the FBI with the manhunt across San Juan.

The Houk killings, they had called them. Leaphorn, who forgot little, remembered the names. Delia Houk, the mother. Elmore Houk, the brother. Dessie Houk, the sister. Brigham Houk, the killer. Harrison Houk, the father. Harrison Houk had been the survivor. The mourner. Leaphorn remembered him standing on the porch of a stone house, listening intently while the sheriff talked, remembered him climbing up from the river, staggering with fatigue, when it was no longer light enough to search along the bank for Brigham Houk. Or, almost certainly even then, Brigham Houk's drowned body.

Would it be this same H. Houk now whom Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had noted on her calendar? Was Harrison Houk some part of the reason for the uneaten banquet spoiling in the refrigerator? To his surprise Joe Leaphorn found his curiosity had returned. What had prevented Eleanor Friedman-Bernal from coming home for her party with a guest whose name deserved three exclamation points? What caused her to miss a dinner she'd worked so hard to prepare?

Leaphorn walked back into the closet and recovered the album. He flipped through it. Which one was Eleanor Friedman-Bernal? He found a page of what must have been wedding pictures--bride and groom with another young couple. He slipped one of them out of the corners that held it. The bride was radiant, the groom a good-looking Mexican, his expression slightly stunned. The bride's face long, prominent bones, intelligent, Jewish. A good woman, Leaphorn thought. Emma would have liked her. He had two weeks left on his terminal leave. He'd see if he could find her.

Chapter Three

Ť ^ ť

IT HAD BEEN A BAD DAY for Officer Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police. In fact, it had been the very worst day of an abysmal week.

It had started going bad sometime Monday. Over the weekend it had dawned upon some dimwit out at the Navajo Tribal Motor Pool that a flatbed trailer was missing. Apparently it had been missing for a considerable time. Sunday night it was reported stolen.

'How long?' Captain Largo asked at Monday afternoon's briefing. Tommy Zah don't know how long. Nobody knows how long. Nobody seems to remember seeing it since about a month ago. It came in for maintenance. Motor pool garage fixed a bad wheel bearing. Presumably it was then parked out in the lot. But it's not in the lot now. Therefore it has to be stolen. That's because it makes Zah look less stupid to declare it stolen. Better'n admitting he just don't know what the hell they did with it. So we're supposed to find it forem. After whoever took it had time to haul it about as far as Florida.'

Looking back on it, looking for the reason all of what followed came down on him instead of some other officer on the evening shift, Chee could see it was because he had not been looking alert. The captain had spotted it. In fact, Chee had been guilty of gazing out of the assembly room window. The globe willows that shaded the parking lot of the Shiprock sub-agency of the Navajo Tribal Police were full of birds that afternoon. Chee had been watching them, deciding they were finches, thinking what he would say to Janet Pete when he saw her again. Suddenly he became aware that Largo had been talking to him.

'You see it out there in the parking lot?'

'Sir?'

'The goddam trailer,' Largo said. 'It out there?'

'No sir.'

'You been paying enough attention to know what trailer we're talking about?'

'Motor pool trailer,' Chee said, hoping Largo hadn't changed the subject.

'Wonderful,' Largo said, glowering at Chee. 'Now from what Superintendent Zah said on the telephone, we're going to get a memo on this today and the memo is going to say that they called our dispatcher way back sometime and reported pilfering out there at night and asked us to keep an eye on things. Long before they mislaid their trailer, you understand. That's to cover the superintendent's ass and make it our fault.'

Largo exhaled a huge breath and looked at his audience--making sure his night shift understood what their commanding officer was dealing with here.

'Now, just about now,' Largo continued, 'they're starting to count all their stuff out there. Tools. Vehicles. Coke machines. God knows what. And sure as hell they're going to find other stuff missing. And not know when they lost it, and claim it got stolen five minutes ago. Or tomorrow if that's handier for `em. Anyway, it will be at some time after--I repeat, after--we've been officially informed and asked to watch out for 'em. And then I'm going to be spending my weekends writing reports to send down to Window Rock.' Largo paused. He looked at Chee.

'So, Chee…'

'Yes sir.' Chee was paying attention now. Too late.

'I want you to keep an eye on that place. Hang around there on your shift. Get past there every chance you get. And make chances. Call the dispatcher to keep it on record that you're watching. When they finish their inventory and find out they've lost other stuff, I don't want `em in a position to blame us. Understand?'

Chee understood. Not that it helped.

That was Monday afternoon. Monday evening it got worse. Even worse than it might have been, because he didn't learn about it until Tuesday.

As instructed, Chee had been hanging close to the motor pool. He would coast out Highway 550 maybe as far as the Hogback formation, which marked the eastern edge of the Big Reservation. Then he would drift back past the motor pool fence and into Shiprock. Stopping now and then to check the gate. Noticing that the summer's accumulation of tumbleweeds piled along the chain-link fence was undisturbed. Drifting down 550 again. Drifting back. Keeping Farmington-Shiprock traffic holding nervously in the vicinity of the speed limit. Boring himself into sleepiness. Calling in now and then to have the dispatcher record that he was diligently watching the motor pool and that all there remained serene.

'Unit Eleven checking at the motor pool,' Chee called. 'All quiet. No sign of entry.'

'Since you're there on five-fifty,' the dispatcher said, 'see what's going on at the Seven-Eleven. Just had a disturbance call.'

Chee had done a quick U-turn, boredom replaced by the uneasiness that always preceded the probability of dealing with a drunk. Or two drunks. Or however many drunks it was taking to disturb the peace at the Shiprock 7-Eleven.

But the parking space in front of the convenience store had been quiet--empty except for an old Dodge sedan and a pickup truck. No drunks. Inside, no drunks either. The woman behind the cash register was reading one of those tabloids convenience stores sell. A green-ink headline proclaimed THE TRUTH ABOUT LIZ TAYLOR'S WEIGHT LOSS. Another declared SIAMESE TWINS BOTH PREGNANT. BLAME MINISTER.

A teenaged boy was inspecting the canned soda pop in the cooler.

'What's the trouble?' Chee asked.

The teenager put down the Pepsi he'd selected, looking guilty. The cashier lowered her paper. She was a middle-aged Navajo woman. Towering House Clan, Chee remembered, named Gorman, or Relman, or something like that. Anglo-type name with six letters. Bunker. Walker. Thomas.

'What?' she asked.

'Somebody called in a disturbance here. What's the trouble?'

'Oh,' the Towering House woman said. 'We had a drunk in here. Where you been?'

'What'd he do? Any damages?'

'She,' the woman said. 'Old Lady George. She went away when she heard me calling the police.'

The cashier's name was Gorman, Chee now remembered. But he was thinking of Old Lady George.

'Which way did she go?'

'Just went,' Mrs. Gorman said. She gestured vaguely. 'Didn't look. I was picking up the cans she knocked over.'

So Chee had gone looking for Old Lady George. He knew her fairly well. She'd been a witness in an automobile theft case he'd worked on -- a very helpful witness. Later, when he was looking for one of her grandsons on an assault warrant, she'd helped him again. Sent the boy down to the station to turn himself in. Besides, she was Streams Come Together Clan, which was linked to Chee's father's clan, which made her a relative. Chee had been raised knowing that you watch out for your relatives.

He had watched out for her, first up and down 550 and then up and down side streets. He found her sitting on a culvert, and talked her into the patrol car, and took her home and turned her over to a worried young woman who he guessed must be a granddaughter. Then he had gone back and established that the motor pool remained intact. At least it seemed to be intact as seen from the highway. But seen from the highway, it hadn't been possible to detect that someone had tinkered with the padlock securing the gate. He heard about that the next day when he reported for work.

Captain Largo's usually big voice was unusually quiet--an ominous sign.

'A backhoe,' Largo said. 'That's what they stole this time. About three tons. Bright yellow. Great big thing. I told Mr. Zah that I had one of my best men watching his place last night. Officer Jim Chee. I told Zah that it must be just another case of forgetting to put it down on the record when somebody borrowed it. You know what he said to me?'

'No sir,' Chee said. 'But nobody stole that on my shift. I was driving back and forth past there the whole time.'

'Really,' Largo said. 'How nice.' He picked up a sheet from the shift squeal report from his desk. He didn't look at it. 'I'm pleased to hear that. Because you know what Zah said to me? He said'--Largo shifted his voice up the scale-- ' Oh, it was stolen last night all right. The guy that runs the service station across the street there told us about it.'' Largo's voice returned to normal. 'This service station man stood there and watchedem drive out with it.'

'Oh,' Chee said, thinking it must have been while he was at the 7-Eleven.

'This Zah is quite a comedian. He told me you'd think sneaking a big yellow backhoe out with one of my policemen watching would be like trying to sneak moonrise past a coyote.'

Chee flushed. He had nothing to say to that. He had heard the simile before somewhere in another form. Hard as sneaking sunrise past a rooster, it had been. A moonrise without a coyote baying was equally impossible, and relating a coyote to Largo's police added a nicely oblique insult. You don't call a Navajo a coyote. The only thing worse is to accuse him of letting his kinfolks starve.

Largo handed Chee the squeal sheet. It confirmed what Zah had told Largo.

Subject Delbert Tsosie informed Officer Shorty that while serving a customer at the Texaco station at approximately 10 P.M. he noticed a man removing the chain from the gate of the motor pool maintenance yard across Highway 550. He observed a truck towing a flatbed trailer drive through the gate into the yard. Subject Tsosie said that approximately fifteen minutes later he noticed the truck driving out the gate towing a machine which he described as probably a backhoe or some sort of trenching machine loaded on the trailer. He said he did not report this to police because he presumed tribal employees had come to get the equipment to deal with some sort of emergency.

'That must have been while I was looking for Old Lady George,' Chee said. He explained, hurrying through the last stages because of Largo's expression.

'Get to work,' Largo said, 'and leave this alone. Sergeant Benally will be chasing the backhoe. Don't mess with it.'

That was Tuesday morning and should have been the very bottom of the week. The pits. It would have been, perhaps, had not Chee driven past the Texaco station on 550 and seen Delbert Tsosie stacking tires. Benally was handling it, but Chee sometimes bought gasoline from Tsosie. No harm in stopping to talk.

'No,' Tsosie said. 'Didn't see either one of them well enough to recognize `em. But you could see one was Dineh -- tall, skinny Navajo. Had on a cowboy hat. I know a lot of 'em that works at the motor pool. They come over here and use the Coke machine and buy candy.

Wasn't none I knew and I was thinking it was a funny time to be coming to work. But I thought they must have forgotten something and was coming for it. And when I saw the backhoe I figured some pipe broke somewhere. Emergency, you know.' Tsosie shrugged.

'You didn't recognize anybody?'

'Bad light.'

'Guy in the truck. You see him at all?'

'Not in the truck,' Tsosie said. 'The skinny Navajo was driving the truck. This guy was following in a sedan. Plymouth two-door. About a `70, '71 maybe. Dark blue but they was doing some bodywork on it. Had an off-color right front fender. Looked white or gray. Maybe primer coat. And lots of patches here and there, like they was getting ready to paint it.'

'Driver not a Navajo?'

'Navajo driving the truck. Belagana driving the Plymouth. And the white guy, I just barely got a look at him. They all sort of look alike anyway. All I notice is freckles and sunburn.'

'Big or little?'

Tsosie thought. 'About average. Maybe sort of short and stocky.'

'What color hair?'

'Had a cap on. Baseball cap. With a bill.'

None of which would have mattered since Benally was handling it, and Tsosie had already told Benally all of this, and probably more. But Saturday morning Chee saw the Plymouth two-door.

It was dark blue, about a 70 model. When it passed him going in the other direction -- Shiprock-bound on 550 -- he saw the mismatched front fender and the patches of primer paint on its doors and the baseball cap on the head of the white man driving it. Without a thought, Chee did a U-turn across the bumpy divider.

He was driving Janet Pete's car. Not exactly Janet Pete's car. Janet had put down earnest money on a Buick Riviera at Quality Pre-owned Cars in Farmington and had asked Chee to test-drive it for her. She had to go to Phoenix Friday and when she got back Monday she wanted to close the deal.

'I guess I've already decided,' Janet had told him. 'It has everything I need and only fourteen thousand miles on it and the price seems reasonable and he's giving me a thousand dollars on my old Datsun and that seems fair.'

To Chee the thousand for the Datsun seemed enough more than fair to arouse suspicion. Janet's Datsun was a junker. But it was clear that Janet was not going to be receptive to discouraging words. She described the Buick as 'absolutely beautiful.' As she described it, the lawyer in Janet Pete fell away. The girl emerged through the delight and enthusiasm, and Janet Pete became absolutely beautiful herself.

'It has the prettiest blue plush upholstery. Lovely color. Dark blue outside with a real delicate pinstripe down the side, and the chrome is just right.' She looked slightly guilty at this. 'I don't usually like chrome,' she said. 'But this…' She performed a gesture with shoulder and face that depreciated this lapse from taste. '… But this… well, I just love it.'

She paused, examining Chee and transforming herself from girl to lawyer. 'I thought maybe you would check it out for me. You drive all the time and you know all about mechanical things. If you don't mind doing it, and there's something seriously wrong with the engine, or something like that, then I could…'

She had left the awful statement unfinished. And Chee had accepted the keys and said sure, he'd be glad to do it. Which wasn't exactly the case. If there was something seriously wrong with the engine, telling her about it wasn't going to make him popular with Janet Pete. And Chee wanted to be popular. He wondered about her. He wondered about a woman lawyer. To be more precise, he wondered if Janet Pete, or any woman, could fill the gap Mary Landon seemed to be leaving in his life.

That was Friday evening. Saturday morning he drove the Buick down to Bernie Tso's garage and put it on the rack. Bernie was not impressed.

'Fourteen thousand miles, my ass,' Bernie said. 'Look at the tread on those tires. And here.' Bernie rattled the universal joint. 'Arizona don't have a law about running back the odometer, but New Mexico does,' he said. 'And she got this junker over in New Mexico. I'd say they fudged the first number a little. Turned her back from forty-four thousand, or maybe seventy-four.'

He finished his inspection of the running gear and lowered the hoist. 'Steering's slack, too,' he said. 'Want me to pull the head and take a look there?'

'Maybe later,' Chee said. 'I'll take it out and see what I can find and then I'll let her decide if she wants to spend any money on it.'

And so he had driven Janet Pete's blue Buick out Highway 550 toward Farmington, glumly noting its deficiencies. Slow response to the gas pedal. Probably easy to fix with an adjustment. Tendency to choke on acceleration. Also fixable. Tendency to steer to the right on braking. Suspension far too soft for Chee, who was conditioned to the cast-iron springing of police cars and pickup trucks. Maybe she liked soft suspension, but this one was also uneven--suggesting a bad shock absorber. And, as Bernie had mentioned, slack steering.

He was measuring this slack, swaying down the Farmington-bound lanes of 550, when he saw the Backhoe Bandit. And it was the slack steering, eventually, that did him in.

He noticed the off-color fender first. He noticed that the car approaching him, Shiprock-bound, was a blue Plymouth sedan of about 1970 vintage. As it passed, he registered the patches of gray-white primer paint on its door. He got only a glimpse of the profile of the driver -- youngish, long blond hair emerging from under a dark billed cap.

Chee didn't give it a thought. He did a U-turn across the bumpy divider and followed the Plymouth.

He was wearing his off-duty work clothes -- greasy jeans and a Coors T-shirt with a torn armpit. His pistol was locked securely in the table beside the cot in his trailer at Shiprock. No radio in the Buick, of course. And it was no chase car. He would simply tag along, determine where the Backhoe Bandit was going, take whatever opportunity presented itself. The Plymouth was in no particular hurry. It did a left turn off 550 on the access road to the village of Kirtland. It crossed the San Juan bridge, did another turn onto a dirt road, and made the long climb up the mesa toward the Navajo Mine and the Four Corners Power Plant. Chee had fallen a quarter-mile back, partly to avoid eating the Plymouth's dust and partly to avoid arousing suspicion. But by the time he reached the escarpment the Backhoe Bandit seemed to have sensed he was being followed. He did another turn onto a poorly graded dirt road across the sagebrush, driving much faster now and producing a rooster tail of dust. Chee followed, pushing the Buick, sending it bouncing and lurching over the humps, fighting the steering where the road was rutted. Through the dust he became belatedly aware the Plymouth had made another turn -- a hard right. Chee braked, skidded, corrected the skid, collected the slack in the steering, and made the turn. He was a little late.

Oops! Right wheel onto the rocky track. Left wheel in the sagebrush. Chee bounced painfully against the Buick's blue plush roof, bounced again, saw through the dust the rocks he should have been avoiding, frantically spun the slack steering wheel, felt the impact, felt something go in the front end, and then simply slid along -- his hat jammed low onto his forehead by its kiss with the ceiling.

Janet Pete's beautiful blue Buick slid sideways, plowing a sedan-sized gash through the sage. It stopped in a cloud of dirt. Chee climbed out.

It looked bad, but not as bad as it might have been. The left front wheel was horizontal, the tie-rod that held it broken. Not as bad as a broken axle. The rest of the damage was, to Chee's thinking, superficial. Just scrapes, dents, and scratches. Chee found the chrome strip that Janet Pete had so admired about fifteen yards back in the brush, peeled off by a limb. He laid it carefully on the backseat. The plume of dust produced by the Plymouth was receding over the rim of the mesa. Chee watched it, thinking about his immediate problem -- getting a tow truck out here to haul in the Buick. Thinking about the five or six miles he would have to walk to get to a telephone, thinking about the seven or eight hundred dollars it was going to cost to patch up the damaged Buick. Thinking about such things was far more pleasant than considering his secondary problem, which was how to break the news to Janet Pete.

'Absolutely beautiful,' Janet Pete had said. 'I fell in love with it,' she'd said. 'Just what I'd always wanted.' But he would think about that later. He was staring into the diminishing haze of dust, but his vision was turned inward -- imprinting the Backhoe Bandit in his memory. The profile, the suggestion of pockmarks on the jaw, the hair, the cap. This had become a matter of pride. He would find the man again, sooner or later.

By midafternoon, with the Buick back at Bernie Tso's garage, it seemed it would be sooner. Tso knew the Plymouth. Had, in fact, once towed it in. And he knew a little about the Backhoe Bandit.

'Everything that goes around comes around,' Chee said, happily. 'Everything balances out.'

'I wouldn't say that,' Tso said. 'What's it going to cost you to balance out this Buick?'

'I mean catching the son of a bitch,' Chee said. 'At least I'm going to be able to do that. Lay that on the captain's desk.'

'Maybe your girlfriend can take it back to the dealer,' Tso said. 'Tell `em she doesn't like the way that front wheel looks.'

'She's not my girlfriend,' Chee said. 'She's a lawyer with DNA. Tribal legal services. I ran into her last summer.' Chee described how he had picked up a man who came to be Janet Pete's client, and had tried to have him kept in the Farmington jail until he had a chance to talk to him, and how sore Pete had been about it.

'Tough as nails,' Chee said. 'Not my type. Not unless I kill somebody and need a lawyer.'

'I don't see how you're going to catch him with what little I know about him,' Tso said.

'Not even his name. All I remember is he works out in the Blanco gas field the other side of Farmington. Or said he did.'

'And that you pulled him in when he had transmission troubles. And he paid you with two hundred-dollar bills. And he told you when you got it fixed to leave it at Slick Nakai's revival tent.'

'Well, yeah,' Tso said.

'And he said you could leave the change with Slick `cause he saw Slick pretty often.'

And now it was Saturday night. Slick Nakai's True Gospel had long since left the place near the Hogback where Tso had gone to tow in the Plymouth. But it was easy enough to locate by asking around. Nakai had loaded his tent, and his portable electric organ, and his sound system into his four-wheel trailer and headed southeast. He had left behind fliers tacked to telephone poles and Scotch-taped to store windows announcing that all hungering for the Word of the Lord could find him between Nageezi and the Dzilith-Na-O-Dith-Hie School.

Chapter Four

Ť ^ ť

FULL DARKNESS CAME LATE on this dry autumn Saturday. The sun was far below the western horizon but a layer of high, thin cirrus clouds still received the slanting light and reflected it, red now, down upon the ocean of sagebrush north of Nageezi Trading Post. It tinted the patched canvas of Slick Nakai's revival tent from faded tan to a doubtful rose and the complexion of Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn from dark brown to dark red.

From a lifetime of habit, Leaphorn had parked his pickup a little away from the cluster of vehicles at the tent and with its nose pointing outward, ready for whatever circumstances and duty might require of it. But Leaphorn was not on duty. He would never be on duty again. He was in the last two weeks of a thirty-day 'terminal leave.' When it ended, his application to retire from the Navajo Tribal Police would be automatically accepted. In fact he was already retired. He felt retired. He felt as if it were all far, far behind him. Faded in the distance. Another life in another world, nothing to do with the man now standing under this red October sunset, waiting for the sounds coming from the True Gospel revival tent to signal a break in the preaching.

He had come to Slick Nakai's revival to begin his hunt. Where had that hyphenated woman gone? Why had she abandoned a meal so carefully prepared, an evening so obviously anticipated? It didn't matter, and yet it did. In a way he couldn't really understand, it would say good-by to Emma. She would have prepared such a meal in anticipation of a treasured guest. Often had done so. Leaphorn couldn't explain it, but his mind made a sort of nebulous connection between Emma's character and that of a woman who probably was quite different. And so he would use the final days of his final leave to find that woman. That had brought him here. That, and boredom, and his old problem of curiosity, and the need for a reason to get away from their house in Window Rock and all its memories.

Whatever had moved him, he was here, on the very eastern fringe of the Navajo Reservation--more than a hundred miles from home.

When circumstances allowed, he would talk to a man whose very existence annoyed him. He would ask questions the man might not answer and which might mean nothing if he did. The alternative was sitting in their living room, the television on for background noise, trying to read. But Emma's absence always intruded. When he raised his eyes, he saw the R. C. Gorman print she'd hung over the fireplace. They'd argued about it. She liked it, he didn't. The words would sound in his ears again. And Emma's laughter. It was the same everywhere he looked. He should sell that house, or burn it. It was in the tradition of the Dineh. Abandon the house contaminated by the dead, lest the ghost sickness infect you, and you died. Wise were the elders of his people, and the Holy People who taught them the Navajo Way. But instead, he would play this pointless game. He would find a woman. If alive, she wouldn't want to be found. If dead, it wouldn't matter.

Abruptly, it became slightly more interesting. He had been leaning on the door of his pickup, studying the tent, listening to the sounds coming from it, examining the grounds (another matter of habit). He recognized a pickup, parked like his own behind the cluster of vehicles. It was the truck of another tribal policeman. Jim Chee's truck. Chee's private truck, which meant Chee was also here unofficially. Becoming a born-again Christian? That hardly seemed likely. As Leaphorn remembered it, Chee was the antithesis of Slick Nakai. Chee was a hatathali. A singer. Or would be one as soon as people started hiring him to conduct their curing ceremonials. Leaphorn looked at the pickup, curious. Was someone sitting in it? Hard to tell in the failing light. What would Chee be doing here?

The sound of music came from the tent. A surprising amount of music, as if a band were playing. Over that an amplified male voice leading a hymn. Time to go in.

The band proved to be two men. Slick Nakai, standing behind what seemed to be a black plastic keyboard, and a thin guitarist in a blue checked shirt and a gray felt hat. Nakai was singing, his mouth a quarter-inch from a stand-mounted microphone, his hands maintaining a heavy rhythm on the keyboard. The audience sang with him, with much swaying and clapping of hands.

'Jesus loves us,' Nakai sang. 'That we know. Jesus loves us. Everywhere.'

Nakai's eyes were on him, examining him, sorting him out. The guitarist was looking at him, too. The hat looked familiar. So did the man. Leaphorn had a good memory for faces, and for just about everything else.

'We didn't earn it,' Nakai sang. 'But He don't care. His love is with us. Everywhere.'

Nakai emphasized this with a flourish at the keyboard, shifting his attention now from Leaphorn to an elderly woman wearing wire-rimmed glasses who was sway-dancing, eyes closed, too caught up with emotion to be aware she had danced into the tangle of electrical cables linking Nakai's sound system to a generator outside the tent. A tall man with a thin mustache standing by the speaker's podium noticed Nakai's concern. He moved quickly, steering the woman clear of the cables. Third member of the team, Leaphorn guessed.

When the music stopped, Nakai introduced him as 'Reverend Tafoya.'

'He's Apache. I tell you that right out,' Nakai said. 'Jicarilla. But that's all right. God made the Apaches, and the belagana, and the blacks, and the Hopis, and us Dineh and everybody else just the same. And he inspired this Apache here to learn about Jesus. And he's going to tell you about that.'

Nakai surrendered the microphone to Tafoya. Then he poured water from a thermos into a Styrofoam cup and carried it back toward where Leaphorn was standing. He was a short man, sturdily built, neat and tidy, with small, round hands, small feet in neat cowboy boots, a round, intelligent face. He walked with the easy grace of a man who walks a lot.

'I haven't seen you here before,' Nakai said. 'If you came to hear about Jesus you're welcome. If you didn't come for that you're welcome anyway.' He laughed, showing teeth that conflicted with the symphony of neatness. Two were missing, one was broken, one was black and twisted. Poor people's teeth, Leaphorn thought. Navajo teeth.

'Because that's about all you hear around me anyway… Jesus talk,' Nakai said.

'I came to see if you can help me with something,' Leaphorn said. They exchanged the soft, barely touching handshake of the Navajo--the compromise of the Dineh between modern convention and the need to be careful with strangers who might, after all, be witches. 'But it can wait until you're through with your revival. I'd like to talk to you then.'

At the podium, Reverend Tafoya was talking about the Mountain Spirits of the Apaches. 'Something like your yei, like your Holy People. But some different, too. That's who my daddy worshiped, and my mother, and my grandparents. And I did too, until I got this cancer. I don't have to tell you people here about cancer…'

'The Reverend will take care of it for a while,' Nakai said. 'What do you need to know? What can I tell you?'

'We have a woman missing,' Leaphorn said. He showed Nakai his identification and told him about Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal. 'You know her?'

'Sure,' Nakai said. 'For maybe three years, or four.' He laughed again. 'But not very well. Never made a Christian out of her. It was just business.' The laugh went away. 'You mean seriously missing? Like foul play?'

'She went to Farmington for the weekend a couple of weeks ago and nobody's heard from her since,' Leaphorn said. 'What was the business you had with her?'

'She studied pots. That was her business. So once in a while she would buy one from me.' Nakai's small, round face was registering concern. 'You think something went wrong with her?'

'You never know about that with missing people,' Leaphorn said. 'Usually they come back after a while and sometimes they don't. So we try to look into it. You a pot dealer?'

Leaphorn noticed how the question sounded, but before he could change it to 'dealer in pots.' Nakai said, 'Just a preacher. But I found out you can sell pots. Pretty big money sometimes. Had a man I baptized over near Chinle give me one. Didn't have any money and he told me I could sell it in Gallup for thirty dollars. Told me where.' Nakai laughed again, enjoying the memory. 'Sure enough. Went to a place there on Railroad Avenue and the man gave me forty-six dollars for it.' He made a bowl of his hands, grinning at Leaphorn. 'The Lord provides,' he said. 'Not too well sometimes, but he provides.'

'So now you go out and dig `em up?'

'That's against the law,' Nakai said, grinning. 'You're a policeman. I bet you knew that. With me, it's once in a long while people bring `em in. Several times at revivals I mentioned that fella who gave me the pot, and how it bought gasoline for a week, and the word got around among the born-again people that pots would give me some gasoline money. So now and then when they got no money and want to offer something, they bring me one.'

'And the Friedman-Bernal woman buys them?'

'Mostly no. Just a time or two. She told me she wanted to see anything I got when I was preaching over around Chinle, or Many Farms -- any of that country over around Chinle Wash. And out around here in the Checkerboard, and if I get up into Utah--Bluff, Montezuma Creek, Mexican Hat. Up in there.'

'So you save them for her?'

'She pays me a little fee to take a look at them, but mostly she doesn't buy any. Just looks. Studies them for a couple of hours. Magnifying glass and all. Makes notes. The deal is, I have to know exactly where they came from.'

'How do you manage that?'

'I tell the people, `You going to bring in a pot to offer to the Lord, then you be sure you tell me where you found it.'' Nakai grinned his small, neat grin at Leaphorn. 'That way, too, I know it's a legal pot. Not dug up off of government land.'

Leaphorn didn't comment on that.

'When's the last time you saw her?' The answer should be late September, or something like that. Leaphorn knew the date he'd seen on Friedman's calendar, but it wasn't something Nakai would be likely to remember.

Nakai extracted a well-worn pocket notebook from his shirt and fingered his way through its pages. 'Be last September twenty-third.'

'More than a month ago,' Leaphorn said. 'What did she want?'

Nakai's round face filled with thought. Behind him, the Reverend Tafoya's voice rose into the high tenor of excitement. It described an old preacher at a revival tent in Dulce calling Tafoya to the front, laying on his hands, 'right there on the place where that skin cancer was eating into my face. And I could feel the healing power flowing…'

'Well,' Nakai said, speaking very slowly. 'She brought back a pot she'd gotten from me back in the spring. A piece of a pot, really. Wasn't all there. And she wanted to know everything I knew about it. Some of it stuff I had already told her. And she'd written it down in her notebook. But she asked it all again. Who I'd got it from. Everything he'd said about where he'd found it. That sort of stuff.'

'Where was it? I mean where you met. And what did this notebook look like?'

'At Ganado,' Nakai said. 'I got a place there. I got home from a revival over by Cameron and I had a note from her asking me to call, saying it was important. I called her there at Chaco Canyon. She wasn't home so I left a message when I'd be back at Ganado again. And when I got back, there she was, waiting for me.'

He paused. 'And the notebook. Let's see now. Little leather-covered thing. Small enough to go in your shirt pocket. In fact that's where she carried it.'

'And she just wanted to talk to you about the pot?'

'Mostly where it came from.'

'Where was that?'

'Fella's ranch between Bluff and Mexican Hat.'

'Private land,' Leaphorn said, his voice neutral.

'Legal,' Nakai agreed.

'Very short visit then,' Leaphorn said. 'Just repeating what you had already told her.'

'Not really. She had a lot of questions. Did I know where she could find the person who had brought it? Could he have gotten it from the south side of the San Juan instead of the north side? And she had me look at the design on it. Wanted to know if I'd seen any like it.'

Leaphorn had discovered that he was liking Nakai a little, which surprised him. 'And you told her he couldn't have found it south of the San Juan because that would be on the Navajo Reservation, and digging up a pot there would be illegal?' He was smiling when he said it and Nakai was smiling when he answered.

'Didn't have to tell Friedman something like that,' Nakai said. 'That sort of thing, she knew.'

'What was special about this pot?'

'It was the kind she was working on, I guess. Anasazi pot, I understand. They look pretty much alike to me, but I remember this one had a pattern. You know, sort of abstract shapes painted onto its surface. That seemed to be what she was interested in. And it had a sort of mixed color. That's what she always had me watching out for. That pattern. It was sort of an impression of Kokopelli, tiny, repeated and repeated and repeated.'

Nakai looked at Leaphorn quizzically. Leaphorn nodded. Yes, he knew about Kokopelli, the Humpbacked Flute Player, the Watersprinkler, the fertility symbol. Whatever you called him, he was a frequent figure in strange pictographs the Anasazi had painted on cliffs across the Colorado Plateau.

'Anytime anyone brought one in like that-- even a little piece of the pot with that pattern on it--then I was to save it for her and she'd pay a minimum of fifty dollars.'

'Who found that pot?'

Nakai hesitated, studied Leaphorn.

'I'm not out hunting pot hunters,' Leaphorn said. 'I'm trying to find this woman.'

'It was a Paiute Clan man they call Amos Whistler,' Nakai said. 'Lives out there near south of Bluff. North of Mexican Water.'

Suddenly Reverend Tafoya was shouting 'Hallelujah,' his voice loud and hoarse, and the crowd was joining him, and the thin man with the hat was doing something with the guitar.

'Anything else? I can talk to you later,' Nakai said. 'I need to help out now.'

'Was that the last time you saw her? The last contact?'

'Yeah,' Nakai said. He started toward the speaker's platform, then turned back. 'One other contact,' he said. 'More or less. A man who works with her came by when I was preaching over at the Hogback there by Shiprock. Fella named…' Nakai couldn't come up with the name. 'Anyway he was a belagana. An Anglo. He said he wanted to pick up a pot I had for her. I didn't have any. He said he understood I had one, or maybe it was some, from over on the San Juan, around Bluff. I said no.' Nakai turned again.

'Was it a tall man? Blond. Youngish. Named Elliot?'

'That's him,' Nakai said.

Leaphorn watched the rest of it. He unfolded a chair at the back of the tent and sat, studied Nakai's techniques, and sorted out what he had learned, which wasn't much.

Nakai's congregation here on the fringe of the Checkerboard Reservation included perhaps sixty people--all Navajos apparently, but Leaphorn wouldn't swear that a few of them weren't from the Jicarilla Reservation, which bordered on Navajo territory here. They were about sixty percent women, and most middle-aged or older. That surprised Leaphorn a little. Without really thinking about it, because this aspect of his culture interested Leaphorn relatively little, he had presumed that those attracted to fundamentalist Christianity would be the young who'd been surrounded by the white man's religion off the reservation. That wasn't true here.

At the microphone, Nakai was gesturing toward the north. 'Right up the highway here-- you could see it from right here if it wasn't dark--right up here you have Huerfano Mesa. We been taught, us Navajos, that that's where First Woman lived, and First Man, and some of the other Holy People, they lived there. Anso when I was a boy, I would go with my uncle and we'd carry a bundle of aghaal up there, and we'd stick those prayer sticks up in a shrine we made up there and we'd chant this prayer. And then sometimes we'd go over to Gobernador Knob…' Nakai gestured toward the east. 'Over there across Blanco Canyon where First Woman and First Man found the Asdza'a' Nad-leehe, and we would leave some of those aghaal over there. And my uncle would explain to me how this was a holy place. But I want you to remember something about Huerfano Mesa. Just close your eyes now and remember how that holy place looked the last time you saw it. Truck road runs up there. It's got radio towers built all over the top of it. Oil companies built `em. Whole forest of those antennae all along the top of our holy place.'

Nakai was shouting now, emphasizing each word with a downward sweep of his fist. 'I can't pray to the mountain no more,' he shouted. 'Not after the white man built all over the top of it. Remember what the stories tell us. Changing Woman left us. She's gone away…'

Leaphorn watched the thin man with the guitar, trying to find a place for him in his memory. He studied the audience, looking for familiar faces, finding a few. Even though he'd rarely worked this eastern Checkerboard side of the Big Reservation, this didn't surprise him. The reservation occupied more space than all of New England but it had a population of no more than 150,000. In a lifetime of policing it, Leaphorn had met, in one way or another, a lot of its inhabitants. And these fifty or sixty assembled under Nakai's old canvas to try the Jesus Road seemed approximately typical. Fewer children than would have been brought to a ceremonial of the traditional Navajo religion, none of the teenagers who would have been hanging around the fringes of a Night Chant playing the mating game, none of the drunks, and certainly no one who looked even moderately affluent. Leaphorn found himself wondering how Nakai paid his expenses. He'd collect whatever donations these people would make, but that wouldn't be much. Perhaps the church he represented paid him out of some missionary fund. Leaphorn considered the pots. What he'd seen in the Nelson's catalog made it clear that some of them brought far, far more than fifty-five dollars. But most of them would have little value and Leaphorn couldn't imagine Nakai getting many of them. Even if they were totally converted, still these were born Navajo. The pots came from burials, and Navajos were conditioned almost from infancy to avoid the dead and to have a special dread of death.

It was exactly what Nakai was talking about. Or, more accurately, shouting. He gripped the microphone stand with both of his small, neat hands, and thundered into it.

'The way I was taught, the way you were taught, when my mother died my uncles came there to the place where we lived out there near Rough Rock and they took the body away and put it somewhere where the coyotes and the ravens couldn't get to it.' Nakai paused, gripped the microphone stand, looked down. 'You remember that?' he asked, in a voice that was suddenly smaller. 'Everybody here remembers somebody dying.' Nakai looked up, recovering both composure and voice. 'And then there's the four days when you don't do nothing but remember. And nobody speaks the name of the dead… Because there's nothing left of them but the chindi, that ghost that is everything that was bad about them and nothing that was good. And I don't say my mother's name anymore-- not ever again--because that chindi may hear me calling it and come back and make me sick. And what about what was good about my mother? What about what was good about your dead people? What about that? Our Holy People didn't tell us much about that. Not that I know about, they didn't. Some of the Dineh, they have a story about a young man who followed Death, and looked down into the underworld, and saw the dead people sitting around down there. But my clan, we didn't have that story. And I think it got borrowed from the Hopi People. It is one of their beliefs.'

Early in this discourse, Leaphorn had been interested in Nakai's strategy. Methods of persuasion intrigued him. But there seemed to be nothing particularly unique in it, and he'd let his attention wander. He had reviewed what little he'd learned from Nakai, and what he might do next, if anything, and then simply watched the audience reaction. Now Leaphorn found himself attentive again. His own Red Forehead Clan had no such story either--at least he hadn't been told it in his own boyhood introduction into the Navajo Way. He had heard it often in his days as an anthropology student at Arizona State. And he'd heard it since from Navajos around Window Rock. But Nakai was probably right. Probably it was another of the many stories the Dineh borrowed from the cultures that surrounded them--borrowed and then refined into abstract philosophical points. The Navajo Way was devoted to the harmony of life. It left death simply terrifying black oblivion.

'We learn this story about how Monster Slayer corners Death in his pit house. But he lets Death live. Because without death there wouldn't be enough room for the babies, for young people. But I can tell you something truer than that.' Nakai's voice had risen again to a shout.

'Jesus didn't let Death live. Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!' Nakai danced across the platform, shouting, drawing from the audience answering shouts. 'When we walk through the Valley of Death, he is with us, that's what Jesus teaches. We don't just drift away into the dark night, a ghost of sickness. We go beyond death. We go into a happy world. We go where there ain't no hunger. There ain't no sorrow. Ain't no drunks. No fighting. No seeing relatives run over out here on the highway. We go into a world where last are first, and the poor are the rich, and the sick are well, and the blind, they see again…'

Leaphorn didn't hear the last of it. He was hurrying out through the tent flap into the darkness. He stood for a while, allowing his eyes to adjust, breathing the cool, clean high-altitude air. Smelling dust, and sagebrush, shaken, remembering the day they brought Emma's body home from the hospital.

It had still been unreal to him, what had happened at Gallup, what the doctor had told him. It had left him stunned. Emma's brothers had come to talk to him about it. He'd simply told them that he knew Emma would want a traditional burial, and they'd left.

They'd taken the body to her mother's place over near Blue Gap Chapter House, on the edge of Black Mesa. Under the brush arbor her old aunt had washed her, and combed out her hair, and dressed her in her best blue velvet skirt, and her old squash-blossom necklace, put on her rings, and wrapped her in a blanket. He had sat in the hogan, watching. Her brothers had picked her up then, and put the body in the back of their truck, and driven down the track toward the cliffs. In about an hour they came back without her and took their cleansing sweat bath. He didn't know--would never know-- where they'd left her. In a crevice somewhere, probably. High. Protected by deadwood from the predators. Hidden away. He had stayed for two days of the silent days of mourning. Tradition demanded four days, to give the dead time to complete their journey into the oblivion of death. Two days was all he could stand. He'd left them.

And her. But no more of this.

Chee's pickup was still there. Leaphorn walked to it.

'Ya te'eh,' Chee said, acknowledging him.

'Ya te,' Leaphorn said. He leaned on the truck door. 'What brings you out to the Reverend Slick Nakai's revival?'

Chee explained about the backhoe loader, and the abortive chase, and what Tso had told him about where the Backhoe Bandit might be found.

'But I don't think he is going to show up tonight,' Chee said. 'Getting too late.'

'You going to go in and ask Nakai who this fellow is?' Leaphorn asked.

'I'm going to do that,' Chee said. 'When he's through preaching and when I get a look at the people coming out of the tent.'

'You think Nakai would tell you he didn't know this guy, and then tip him off you're looking for him?'

Long silence. 'He might,' Chee said. 'But I think I'll risk it.'

Leaphorn didn't comment. It was the decision he would have made. Handle it on Navajo time. No reason to rush in there.

There was no hurry for him either, but he went back into the tent. He'd hear the rest of Nakai's sermon, and see how much money he took in at his collection. And how many, if any, pots. Leaphorn was thinking that maybe he'd learned a little more than he'd first realized. Something had jogged his memory. The thin Navajo with the guitar was the same man he'd seen helping Maxie Davis at the excavation at Chaco Canyon. That answered one small question. A Christian Navajo wouldn't be worrying about stirring up the chindi of long-dead Anasazi. But it also made an interesting connection--a man who dug up scientific pots at Chaco worked for a man who sold theoretically legal pots. And a man who sold theoretically legal pots linked to a man who stole a backhoe. Backhoes were machines notoriously useful in uprooting Anasazi ruins and despoiling their graves.

It was just about then, as he walked out of the darkness into the tent, that he became aware of something in his attitude about all this.

He felt an urgency now. The disappearance of Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had been merely something curious--an oddity. Now he sensed something dangerous. He had never been sure he could find the woman. Now he wondered if she'd be alive if he did.

Chapter Five

Ť ^ ť

REMEMBER, BOY,' Uncle Frank Sam Nakai would sometimes tell Chee, 'when you're tired of walking up a long hill you think about how easy it's going to be walking down.' Which was Nakai's Navajo way of saying things tend to even up. For Chee this proved, as his uncle's aphorisms often did, to be true. Chee's bad luck was followed by good luck.

Early Monday a San Juan County sheriffs deputy, who happened to have read the paperwork about the stolen flatbed trailer and backhoe, also happened to get more or less lost while trying to deliver a warrant. He turned off on an access road to a Southern Union pump site and found the trailer abandoned. The backhoe apparently had been unloaded, driven about twenty yards on its own power, and then rolled up a makeshift ramp--presumably into the back of a truck. The truck had almost new tires on its dual rear wheels. The tread pattern was used by Dayton Tire and Rubber, with a single dealer in Farmington and none in Shiprock. The dealer had no trouble remembering. The only truck tires he sold for a month had been to Farmington U-Haul. The company had three trucks out at the moment with dual rear wheels. Two had been recently reshod with Daytons. One was rented to a Farmington furniture company. The other, equipped with a power winch, was rented to Joe B. Nails, P.O. Box 770, Aztec, using a MasterCard.

Farmington police had a record on Nails. One driving while intoxicated. It was enough to provide an employer's name. Wellserve, Inc., a contractor maintaining the Gasco collection system. But Wellserve was a former employer. Nails had quit in August.

Chee learned all of this good news secondhand. He'd spent the morning hanging around Red Rock, worrying about what he'd tell Janet Pete when she got back from Phoenix, and waiting for a witness he was supposed to deliver to the FBI office in Farmington. With that done two hours behind schedule, he had stopped at the Shiprock headquarters and got the first half of the news about the trailer. He'd spent the afternoon hunting around Teec Nos Pos for a fellow who'd broken his brother-in-law's leg. No luck on that. When he pulled back into Shiprock to knock off for the day, he ran into Benally going off shift.

'I guess we got your Backhoe Bandit,' Benally said. And he filled Chee in on the rest of it. 'U-Haul calls us when he checks the truck in.'

That struck Chee as stupid. 'You think he'll have the backhoe in it when he returns it?' Chee said. 'Otherwise, no proof of anything. What you charge him with?'

Benally had thought of that and so had Captain Largo.

'We bring him in. We tell him we have witnesses who saw him taking the thing out, and we can connect it to the truck he rented, and if he'll cooperate and tell us where it is so we can recover it, and snitch on his buddy, then we go light on him.' Benally shrugged, not thinking it would work either. 'Better than nothing,' he added. 'Anyway, the call's out on the U-Haul truck. Maybe we catch him with the backhoe in it.'

'I doubt it,' Chee said.

Benally agreed. He grinned. 'The best plan would have been for you to have grabbed him when he was driving out of the yard with it.'

Chee called Pete's office from the station phone. He'd break it by degrees. Tell her first that a lot of things were wrong with the Buick, sort of slip into the part about tearing it up. But Miss Pete wasn't in, wasn't back from Phoenix, had called in and said she'd be held over for a day.

Wonderful. Chee felt immense relief. He put the Buick out of his mind. He thought about the Backhoe Bandit, who was going to get away with it. He thought about what the preacher had told him Saturday night.

The preacher said he didn't know the name of the man who owned the patched-up car. He thought he'd heard him called Jody, or maybe Joey. He thought the man worked in the Blanco field--maybe for Southern Union Gas, but maybe not. The man sometimes brought him a pot which the preacher said he sometimes bought. The last time he saw him, the man had asked if the preacher would buy a whole bunch of pots if the man could get them. 'And I told him maybe I could and maybe I couldn't. It would depend on whether I had any money.'

'So maybe he'll come back again and maybe he won't.'

'I think he'll be back,' the preacher had said. 'I told him if I couldn't handle it, I knew somebody who could.' And he told Chee about the woman anthropologist, and that led him to Lieutenant Leaphorn. The preacher was a talkative man.

Chee sat now in his pickup truck beside the willows shading the police parking lot. He felt relief on one hand, pressure on the other. The dreaded meeting with Janet Pete was off, at least until tomorrow. But when it came, he wanted to conclude his story by telling Pete how he had nailed the man to blame for all this. It didn't seem likely that was going to happen. Largo's solution was sensible if you were patient, even though it probably wouldn't produce an indictment. Aside from what it had done to Chee, the crime was relatively minor. Theft of equipment worth perhaps $10,000 in its badly used condition. Hardly an event to provoke all-out deployment of police to run down evidence. So the Backhoe Bandit would get away with it. Unless the rent-a-truck could be found with the backhoe on it. Where would it be?

Chee shifted sideways in the seat, leaned a knee against the dashboard, thought. Nails was a pot hunter. Probably he wanted the backhoe for digging up burials to find a lot of them. With the teeth removed from the shovel to minimize breakage, they were a favorite tool of the professionals. And from what the preacher said, Nails must be going professional. He must have found a likely ruins. What Nails had told the preacher suggested he'd found a wholesale source. Therefore it was a safe presumption that he'd stolen the backhoe to dig them.

So far it was easy. The hard question was where?

The willow branches dangling around Chee's pickup had turned yellow with the season. Chee studied them a moment to rest the brain. Surely he must know something helpful. How about the trailer? Stolen. Then brought back to haul out the backhoe. Then abandoned in favor of the truck? The night the trailer was stolen the backhoe was still being repaired. Had the head off the engine, in fact. So they took the trailer, and brought it back when the backhoe was ready to roll. Pretty stupid, on the face of it. But Chee had checked and learned the trailer was scheduled to haul equipment to a job at Burnt Water the next day. The Backhoe Bandit knew a hell of a lot about what went on in that maintenance yard. Interesting, but it didn't help now.

The next answers did. The question was why steal the trailer at all? Why not simply rent the U-Haul truck earlier, and haul the backhoe out on that? And why not rent the backhoe, instead of stealing it? As Chee thought it through, the answers connected. Rental trucks were easy to trace, so the Backhoe Bandit avoided the risk of having the truck seen at the burglary. A rented backhoe would also be easy to trace. But there would be no reason to trace it if it was checked back in after it was used. So why… ? Chee's orderly mind sorted through it. The truck was needed instead of the trailer because the trailer couldn't be pulled where the backhoe was needed. Could it be the dig site was somewhere from which the backhoe couldn't be extricated? Of course. It would be at the bottom of someplace, and that would explain why Nails had rented a truck with a power winch. Running a backhoe down the steep slope of a canyon could well be possible where pulling it out wouldn't be.

Chee climbed out of the cab, trotted into the office, and called the Farmington office of Wellserve, Inc. Yes, they could provide the police with a copy of their well-service route map. Yes, the service superintendent could mark the route Nails had served.

When Chee left Wellserve with the map folded on the seat beside him he had three hours left before sundown. Then there would be a half-moon. A good night for a pot hunter to work, and a good night to hunt pot hunters. He stopped at the sheriffs office and found out who was patrolling where tonight. If Nails was off reservation land, he'd need a deputy along to make an arrest. Then he drove up the San Juan River valley through the little oil town of Bloomfield, and out of the valley into the infinity of sagebrush that covers the Blanco Plateau. He was remembering he'd read somewhere of somebody estimating more than a hundred thousand Anasazi sites on the Colorado Plateau--only a few of them excavated, only a few thousand even mapped. But it wouldn't be impossible. He would guess Nails had found sites along the service roads he traveled and would be looting them. Chee knew some of those sites himself. And he knew what attracted the Anasazi. A cliff faced to catch the winter sun and shaded in the summer, enough floodplain to grow something, and a source of water. That, particularly the water, narrowed it a lot.

He scouted Canyon Largo first, and Blanco Canyon, and Jasis Canyon. He found two sites that had been dug into fairly recently. But nothing new and no sign of the tire tread pattern he was looking for. He moved north then and checked Gobernador Canyon and La Jara and the Vaqueros Wash eastward in the Carson National Forest. He found nothing. He skipped westward, driving far faster than the speed limit down New Mexico Highway 44. The light was dying now--a cloudless autumn evening with the western sky a dull copper glow. He checked out a couple of canyons near Ojo Encino, restricting himself always to the access roads gouged out to reach the gas wells and pump stations Nails had been serving.

By midnight he finished checking the roads leading from the Star Lake Pump Station, driving slowly, using his flashlight to check for tracks at every possible turnoff. He circled back past the sleeping trading post the maps called White Horse Lake. He crossed the Continental Divide, and dropped into the network of arroyos that drain Chaco Mesa. Again he found nothing. He circled back across Chaco Wash and picked up the gravel road that leads northwestward toward Nageezi Trading Post.

Beyond Betonnie Tsosie Wash he stopped the pickup in the middle of the road. He climbed out wearily, stretched, and turned on the flash to check the turnoff of an access trail. He stood in the light of the half-moon, yawning, his flash reflecting from the chalky dust. It showed, clear and fresh, the dual tracks of an almost new Dayton tire tread.

Chee's watch showed 2:04 A.M. At 2:56 he found the place where, maybe a thousand years ago, a little band of Anasazi families had lived, and built their cluster of small stone shelters and living spaces, and died. Chee had been walking for more than a mile. He had left his pickup by a pump site and followed the twin tracks on foot. The pump marked the dead end of this branch of the service road -- if two ruts wandering through the sage and juniper could be called that. From here, the dual tires had made their own road. Away from the hard-packed ruts, they were easy to follow now -- crushed tumbleweeds, broken brush, the sharp smell of bruised sage.

They led up a long slope, and Chee guessed they wouldn't lead far. He walked carefully and quietly, moon over his shoulder, flash off. The slow huffing of the pump motor diminished behind him. He stopped, listening for the sound the backhoe motor would be making. He heard a coyote, and then its partner. One behind him, one on the ridge to his left. It was work time for predators, with all the little nocturnal rodents out braving death to find a meal.

He didn't see the truck until he was within fifty feet of it. Nails had nosed it into a cluster of juniper just over the crest of the hill. The doors of its van box stood open, a square black shape with the ramp used to unload the backhoe still in place. Chee stared, listening, feeling a mixture of excitement, exultation, and uneasiness. He put his hand on the pistol in his jacket pocket. Chee did not like pistols in general, and the one he had carried since being sworn into the force was no exception. But now the heavy hard metal was reassuring. He walked to the truck, placing each step carefully, stopping to listen. The cab was empty, the doors unlocked. The wire cable from the winch spool extended down the steep slope, slack. If the backhoe was down there, as it must be, the engine wasn't running. The silence was almost total. From far behind him, he could hear the faint sound of the walking beam pump. No coyote sounds now. The air was moving up the slope past his face, a faint coolness.

Chee held the cable in his left hand and started down the slope, following the path broken by the backhoe, trying to keep his weight on his feet, trying to avoid the noise sliding would make.

The slope was too steep. He slid a few feet, regained control. Slid again as the earth gave way under his feet. Then he lay on his back, motionless, breathing dust, cursing under his breath at the noise he had made. He listened, hand gripping the cable. Down here under the ridge, he could no longer hear the distant pump motor. The coyote yipped somewhere off to his left and provoked an answering yip from its partner. He saw the backhoe, partially visible through the brush, its motor silent. The half-moon lit the roof of its cab, the shovel, and part of the jointed arm that controlled it. Nails apparently had been frightened away. It didn't matter. He had the backhoe. He had the truck that had hauled it here, and the record would show Nails had rented the truck.

Chee gripped the cable and shifted his free hand to push himself erect. He felt cloth under his fingers. And a button. And the hard bone and cold skin of a wrist. He scrambled away from it.

The form lay facedown, head upslope, in the deep darkness cast by a juniper--its left hand stretching out toward the cable. A man, Chee saw. He squatted, controlling the shock. And when it was controlled, he leaned forward and felt the wrist.

Dead. Dead long enough to be stiff. He bent low over the corpse and turned on his flash. It wasn't Nails. It was a Navajo. A young man, hair cut short, wearing a blue checked shirt with two stains on its back. Chee touched one of them with a tentative finger. Stiff. Dried blood. The man had apparently been shot twice. In the middle of the back and just above the hip.

Chee snapped off the light. He thought of the Navajo's ghost, hovering nearby. He turned his mind away from that. The chindi was out there, representing all that was evil in the dead man's being. But one did not think of chindis out in the darkness. Where was Nails? Most likely, hours away from here. But why did he leave the truck? This Navajo must be the one seen with Nails when they'd stolen the backhoe. Maybe the Navajo had driven the truck, Nails had come in his own car. Odd, but possible.

Chee moved cautiously the few remaining yards to the bottom of the hill. It was full dark here, the moonlight blocked by the high ground. Just enough reflected light to guide his feet. A falling out of thieves, Chee thought. A fight. Nails pulls a gun. The Navajo runs. Nails shoots him. He didn't believe Nails would still be here, or anywhere near here. But he walked carefully.

Even so he almost tripped over the bag before he saw it. It was black plastic, the sort sold in little boxes of a dozen to line wastebaskets. Chee untwisted the wire securing its top and felt inside. Fragments of pottery, just as he'd expected. Between him and the backhoe, more such bags were clustered. Chee walked past them to look at the machine.

It had been turned off with the shovel locked high over the trench it had been digging into a low, brush-covered mound. Scattered along the excavation was a clutter of flat stones. Once they must have formed the wall of an Anasazi settlement. He didn't notice the bones until he turned on his flash.

They were everywhere. A shoulder blade, a thigh bone, part of a skull, ribs, four or five connected vertebrae, part of a foot, a lower jaw.

Jim Chee was modern man built upon traditional Navajo. This was simply too much death. Too many ghosts disturbed. He backed away from the excavation, flashlight still on, careful no longer. He wanted only to be away from here. Into the sunlight. Into the cleansing heat of a sweat bath. To be surrounded by the healing, curing sounds of a Ghostway ceremonial. He started up the slope, pulling himself up by the cable.

The panic receded. First he would check the backhoe cab. He trotted to it, guided by the flash. He checked the metal serial-number plate and the Navajo Nation Road Department number painted on its side. Then he flashed the light into the cab.

A man was sitting there, slumped sideways against the opposite door, his open eyes reflecting white in Chee's flash. The left side of his face was black with what must be blood. But Chee could see his mustache and enough of his face to know that he had found Joe Nails.

Chapter Six

Ť ^ ť

LEAPHORN CAME HOME to Window Rock long after midnight. He hadn't bothered to turn on the lights. He drank from his cupped palms in the bathroom and folded his clothing over the bedside chair (where Emma had so often sat to read or knit, to do the thousand small things that Emma did). He had turned the bed ninety degrees so that his eyes would open in the morning to the shock of a different view. That broke his lifelong habit, the automatic waking thought of 'Where's Emma?' and what then followed. He had moved from his side of the bed to Emma's -- which had eliminated that once-happy habit of reaching out to touch her when he drifted into sleep.

Now he lay flat on his back, feeling tired muscles relax, thinking about the food in Eleanor Friedman-Bernal's refrigerator, drifting from that to her arrangement with Nakai to inspect contributed pots and from that to the notebook Nakai had described. He hadn't noticed a pocket-sized leather notebook in her apartment--but then it might be almost anywhere in the room. Thatcher had made no real search. On the long drive homeward across the Checkerboard from Huerfano Mesa, he had thought of why Elliot hadn't mentioned being sent by Friedman to see Nakai and collect a pot. It must have seemed odd to Elliot, this abortive mission. Why not mention it? Before Leaphorn could come to any conclusion, he drifted off to sleep, and it was morning.

He showered, inspected his face, decided he could go another few days without a shave, made himself a breakfast of sausage and fried eggs--violating his diet with the same guilty feelings he always had when Emma was away visiting her family. He read the mail that Saturday had brought him, and the Gallup Independent. He snapped on the television, snapped it off again, stood at the window looking out on the autumn morning. Windless. Cloudless. Silent except for a truck rolling down Navajo Route 3. The little town of Window Rock was taking Sunday off. Leaphorn noticed the glass was dusty--a condition Emma had never tolerated. He got a handkerchief from his drawer and polished the pane. He polished other windows. Abruptly he walked to the telephone and called Chaco Canyon.

Until recently telephone calls between the world outside and Chaco had traveled via a Navajo Communications Company telephone line. From Crownpoint northeast, the wire wandered across the rolling grassland, attached mostly to fence posts and relying on its own poles only when no fence was available going in the right direction. This system made telephone service subject to the same hazards as the ranch fence on which it piggybacked. Drifts of tumbleweeds, winter blizzards, dry rot, errant cattle, broke down both fences and communications. When it was operating, voices sometimes tended to fade in and out with the wind velocity. But recently this system had been modernized. Calls were now routed two hundred miles east to Santa Fe, then beamed to a satellite and re-broadcast to a receiving dish at Chaco. The space age system, like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration which made it possible, was frequently out of operation. When it operated at all, voices tended to fade in and out with the wind velocity. Today was no exception.

A woman's voice answered, strong at first, then drifting away into space. No, Bob Luna wasn't in. No use ringing his number because she'd seen him driving away and she hadn't seen him return.

How about Maxie Davis?

Just a minute. She might not be up yet. It was, after all, early Sunday morning.

Maxie Davis was up. 'Who?' she asked. 'I'm sorry. I can hardly hear you.'

Leaphorn could hear Maxie Davis perfectly-- as if she were standing beside him. 'Leaphorn,' he repeated. 'The Navajo cop who was out there a couple of days ago.'

'Oh. Have you found her?'

'No luck,' Leaphorn said. 'Do you remember a little leather-covered notebook she used? Probably carried in her shirt pocket?'

'Notebook? Yeah. I remember it. She always used it when she was working.'

'Know where she keeps it? When it's not with her?'

'No idea. Probably in a drawer somewhere.'

'You've known her long?'

'Off and on, yes. Since we were graduate students.'

'How about Dr. Elliot?'

Maxie Davis laughed. 'We're sort of a team, I guess you'd say.' And then, perhaps thinking Leaphorn would misunderstand, added: 'Professionally. We're the two who write the bible on the Anasazi.' again, the sound fading in and out. `After Randall Elliot and me, no more need for Anasazi research.'

'Not Friedman-Bernal? She's not part of it?'

'Different field,' Davis said. 'She's ceramics. We're people. She's pots.'

They had decided, he and Emma, to install the telephone in the kitchen. To hang it on the wall beside the refrigerator. Standing there, listening to Maxie Davis, Leaphorn inspected the room. It was neat. No dishes, dirty or otherwise, were in sight. Windows clean, sink clean, floor clean. Leaphorn leaned forward to the full reach of the telephone receiver cord and plucked a napkin from the back of the chair. He'd used it while he'd eaten his eggs. He held the receiver against his ear with his shoulder while he folded it.

'I'm going to come back out there,' he said. 'I'd like to talk to you. And to Elliot if he's there.'

'I doubt it,' Maxie Davis said. 'He's usually out in the field on Sunday.'

But Elliot was there, leaning against the porch support watching Leaphorn as he parked his pickup in the apartment's courtyard.

'Ya tay,' Elliot said, getting the pronunciation of the Navajo greeting almost right. 'Didn't know policemen worked on Sunday.'

'They don't tell you that when they recruit you,' Leaphorn said, 'but it happens now and then.'

Maxie Davis appeared at the door. She was wearing a loose blue T-shirt decorated with a figure copied from a petroglyph. Short dark hair fell around her face. She looked feminine, intelligent, and beautiful.

'I'll bet I know where she keeps that notebook,' Davis said. 'Do you still have the key?'

Leaphorn shook his head. 'I'll get one from headquarters.' Or, he thought, failing that, it would be simple enough to get into the apartment. He'd noticed that when Thatcher had unlocked the door.

'Luna's away,' Elliot said. 'We can get in through the patio door.'

Elliot managed it with the long blade of his pocketknife, simply sliding the blade in and lifting the latch.

'Something you learn in graduate school,' he said.

Or in juvenile detention centers, Leaphorn thought. He wondered if Elliot had ever been in one of those. It didn't seem likely. Jail is not socially acceptable for prep school boys. Everything seemed exactly as it had been when he'd been here with Thatcher--the same stale air, the same dustiness, the boxes of pots, the disarray. Thatcher had searched it, in his tentative way, looking for evidence that Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal was a violator of the Federal Antiquities Act. Now Leaphorn intended to search it in his own way, looking for the woman herself.

'Ellie kept her purse in the dresser,' Maxie Davis said. She opened a bottom drawer. 'In here. And I remember seeing her drop that notebook in it when she came in from work.'

Davis extracted a purse and handed it to Leaphorn. It was beige leather. It looked new and it looked expensive. Leaphorn unsnapped it, checked through lipstick, small bottles, package of sugarless gum, Tums, small scissors, odds and ends. No small leather notebook. Emma had three purses--a very small one, a very good one, and a worn one used in the workaday world of shopping.

'She had another purse?' Leaphorn said, making it half a question.

Davis nodded. 'This was her good one.' She checked into the drawer. 'Not here.'

Leaphorn's mild disappointment at not finding the notebook was offset by mild surprise. The wrong purse was missing. Friedman-Bernal had not taken her social purse with her for the weekend. She had taken her working purse.

'I want to take a sort of rough inventory,' Leaphorn said. 'I'm going to rely on your memory. See if we can determine what she took with her.'

There were the disclaimers he expected, from both Maxie Davis and Elliot, that they really didn't know much about Ellie's wardrobe or Ellie's possessions. But within an hour, they had a rough list on the back of an envelope. Ellie had taken no suitcase. She had taken a small canvas gym bag. She'd probably taken no makeup or cosmetics. No skirt was missing. No dress. She had taken only jeans and a long-sleeved cotton shirt.

Maxie Davis sat on the bed, examining her jottings, looking thoughtful. 'No way of knowing about socks or underwear or things like that. But I don't think she took any pajamas.' She motioned toward the chest of drawers. 'There's an old blue pair in there I've seen her wear, and a sort of worn-out checked set, and a fancy new pair. Silk.' Davis looked at him, checking the level of Leaphorn's understanding of such things. 'For company,' she explained. 'I doubt if she would have a fourth set, or bring it out here anyway.'

'Okay,' Leaphorn said. 'Did she have a sleeping bag?'

'Yeah,' Davis said. 'Of course.' She sorted through the things on the closet shelf. 'That's gone too,' she said.

'So she was camping out,' Leaphorn said. 'Sleeping out. Probably nothing social. Probably working. Who did she work with?'

'Nobody, really,' Elliot said. 'It was a one-woman project. She worked by herself.'

'Let's settle down somewhere and talk about that,' Leaphorn said.

They settled in the living room. Leaphorn perched on the edge of a sofa that looked and felt as if it would fold outward into a bed, Davis and Elliot on the Park Service Purchasing Office low-bid overstuffed couch. Much of what Leaphorn heard he already knew from his own studies a lifetime ago at Arizona State. He had considered telling the two about his master's degree and decided against it. The time that might have saved had no value to Leaphorn now. And sometimes something might be gained by seeming to know less than you did. And so Leaphorn listened patiently to basic stuff, mostly from Davis, about how the Anasazi culture had risen on the Colorado Plateau, almost certainly a progression from the small, scattered families of hunters and seed collectors who lived in pit houses, and somehow learned to make baskets, and then the rudiments of agriculture, and then how to irrigate their crops by controlling runoff from rain, and -- probably in the process of caulking baskets with fire-dried mud to make them waterproof -- how to make pottery.

'Important cultural breakthrough,' Elliot inserted. 'Improved storage possibilities. Opened a door to art.' He laughed. 'Also gave anthropology something a lot more durable than baskets to hunt, and measure, and study, and all that. But you already know a lot about this, don't you?'

'Why do you say that?' Leaphorn never allowed a subject to shift him from the role of interrogator unless Leaphorn wanted to be shifted.

'Because you don't ask any questions,' Elliot said. 'Maxie isn't always perfectly clear. Either you're not interested in this background, or you already know it.'

'I know something about it,' Leaphorn said. 'You've said Friedman's interest was in pottery. Apparently she was interested mostly in one kind of pot. Pots which have a kind of corrugated finish. Probably some other revealing details. Right?'

'Ellie thought she had identified one specific potter,' Elliot said. 'A distinctive individual touch.'

Leaphorn said nothing. That sounded mildly interesting. But--even given the intense interest of anthropologists in the Anasazi culture and its mysterious fate--it didn't seem very important. His expression told Elliot what he was thinking.

'One potter. Dead probably seven hundred and fifty years.' Elliot put his boots on the battered coffee table. 'So what's the big deal? The big deal is, Ellie knows where he lived. Out there at BC57, across the wash from Pueblo Bonito, because she found a lot of his pots there broken in the process of being made. Must have been where he worked…'

'She,' Maxie Davis said. 'Where she worked.'

'Okay, she.' Elliot shook his head, regaining his chain of thought, showing no sign of irritation. It was part of a game they played, Leaphorn thought. Elliot's boots were dusty, scarred, flat-heeled, practical. A soft brown leather, perfectly fitted, extremely expensive.

Davis was leaning forward, wanting Leaphorn to understand this. 'Nobody before had ever found a way to link the pot with the person who made it--not before Ellie began noticing this peculiar technique repeated in a lot of those BC57 pots. She had already noticed it in a couple of others from other places--and now she had found the source. Where they came from. And she was lucky in another way. Not only was this potter prolific, she was good. Her pots traded around. Ellie tracked one back to the Salmon Ruins over on the San Juan, and she thinks one came out of a burial near the White House Ruin in Canyon de Chelly, and…'

If Elliot had any objection to Maxie Davis's commandeering his story, his face hadn't showed it. But now he said: 'Get to the important point.'

Maxie looked at him. 'Well, she's not sure about that,' she said.

'Maybe not, but this BC57 site was one of the last ones built--just before everybody disappeared. They dated a roof beam to 1292, and some of the charcoal in what might have been a kiln fire to 1298. So she was working just about the time they turned out the lights here and walked away. And Ellie is beginning to think she might be able to pin down where she went.'

'That's the really big deal out here.' Davis waved her arms. 'Where'd the Anasazi go? The big huge mystery that all the magazine writers write about.'

'Among a couple of other big questions,' Elliot said. 'Like why they built roads when they didn't have wheels, or pack animals, and why they left, and why they lived in this place in the first place with so damn little wood, or water, or good land, and…' Elliot shrugged. 'The more we learn, the more we wonder.'

'This man who was coming out to see her the week after she disappeared, do you know who he was?'

'Lehman,' Davis said. 'He came.' She smiled ruefully. 'Plenty sore about it. He came on a Wednesday and it had rained Tuesday night and you know how that road gets.'

'And he's…' Leaphorn began to ask.

'He's the hotshot in Ellie's field,' Elliot said. 'I think he was chairman of her dissertation committee when she got her doctorate at Madison. Now he's a professor at University of New Mexico. Two or three books on Mimbres, and Hohokam, and Anasazi pottery evolution. Top guru in the ceramics field.'

'Ellie's equivalent of our Devanti,' Davis said. 'She pretty well had to persuade Lehman she knew what she was talking about. Like in migrations, Elliot and I have to deal with our top honcho.'

'Doctor Delbert Devanti,' Elliot said. 'Arkansas's answer to Einstein.' The tone was sardonic.

'He's proved some things,' Maxie Davis said, her voice flat. 'Even if he didn't go to Phillips Exeter Academy, or Princeton.'

There was silence. Elliot's long, handsome face had become stiff and blank. Maxie glanced at him. In the glance Leaphorn read… what? Was it anger? Malice? She turned to Leaphorn. 'Please note the blue blood's lofty contempt for the plebeians. Devanti is definitely a plebe. He sounds like corn pone.'

'And is often wrong,' Elliot said.

Davis laughed. 'There is that,' she said.

'But you give people the right to be wrong if they came out of the cotton patch,' Elliot said. His voice sounded normal, or almost normal, but Leaphorn could see the tension in the line of his jaw.

'More of an excuse for it,' Maxie said, mildly. 'Maybe he overlooked something while he was working nights to feed his family. No tutors to do his digging in the library.'

To that, Randall Elliot said nothing. Leaphorn watched. Where would this tension lead? Nowhere, apparently. Maxie had nothing more to say.

'You two work as a team,' Leaphorn said. 'That right?'

'More or less,' Davis said. 'We have common interests in the Anasazi.'

'Like how?' Leaphorn asked.

'It's complicated. Actually it involves food economics, nutrition tolerances, population sizes, things like that, and you spend a lot more time working on programming statistical projections in the computer than you do digging in the field. Really dull stuff, unless you're weird enough to be into it.' She smiled at Leaphorn. A smile of such dazzling charm that once it would have destroyed him.

'And Randall here,' she added, 'is doing something much more dramatic.' She poked him with her elbow--a gesture that almost made what she was saying mere teasing. 'He is revolutionizing physical anthropology. He is finding a way to solve the mystery, once and for all, of what happened to these people.'

'Population studies,' Elliot said in a low voice. 'Involves migrations and genetics.'

'Rewrites all the books if it works,' Maxie Davis said, smiling at Leaphorn. 'Elliots do not spend their time on small things. In the navy they are admirals. In universities they are presidents. In politics they are senators. When you start at the top you have to aim high. Or everybody is disappointed.'

Leaphorn was uncomfortable. 'It would be a problem,' he said.

'But not one I had,' Maxie Davis said. 'I'm white trash.'

'Maxie never tires of reminding me of the silver spoon in my crib,' Elliot said, managing a grin. 'It doesn't have much to do with finding Ellie, though.'

'But you have a point,' Leaphorn said. 'Dr. Friedman wouldn't have missed that appointment with Lehman without a good reason.'

'Hell, no,' Maxie said. 'That's what I told that idiot at the sheriff's office.'

'Do you know why he was coming? Specifically.'

'She was going to bring him up-to-date,' Elliot said.

'She was going to hit him with a bombshell,' Maxie said. 'That's what I think. I think she finally had it put together.'

There was something in Elliot's expression. Maybe skepticism. Or disapproval. But Davis was enthusiastic.

'What did she tell you?'

'Nothing much, really. But I could just sense it. That things were working out. But she wouldn't say much.'

'It's not traditional,' Elliot said. 'Not among us scientists.'

Leaphorn found himself as interested in what was going on with Elliot as in the thrust of the conversation. Elliot's tone now was faintly mocking. Davis had caught it, too. She looked at Elliot and then back at Leaphorn, speaking directly to him.

'That's true,' she said. 'Before one boasts, one must have done something to boast about.'

She said it in the mildest of voices, without looking at Elliot, but Elliot's face flushed.

'You think she had found something important,' Leaphorn said. 'She didn't tell you anything, but something caused you to think that. Something specific. Can you think what it was?'

Davis leaned back on the couch. She caught her lower lip between her teeth. She laid her hand, in a gesture that looked casual, on Elliot's thigh. She thought.

'Ellie was excited,' she said. 'Happy, too. For a week, maybe a little longer, before she left.' She got up from the couch and walked past Leaphorn into the bedroom. Infinite grace, Leaphorn thought.

'She'd been over in Utah. I remember that. To Bluff, and Mexican Hat and--' Her voice from the bedroom was indistinct.

'Montezuma Creek?' Leaphorn asked.

'Yes, all that area along the southern edge of Utah. And when she came back'--Davis emerged from the bedroom carrying a Folgers Coffee carton--'she had all these potsherds.' She put the box on the coffee table. 'Same ones, I think. At least, I remember it was this box.'

The box held what seemed to Leaphorn to be as many as fifty fragments of pots, some large, some no more than an inch across.

Leaphorn sorted through them, looking for nothing in particular but noticing that all were reddish brown, and all bore a corrugated pattern.

'Done by her potter, I guess,' Leaphorn said. 'Did she say where she got them?'

'From a Thief of Time,' Elliot said. 'From a pot hunter.'

'She didn't say that,' Davis said.

'She went to Bluff to look for pot hunters. To see what they were finding. She told you that.'

'Did she say which one?' Leaphorn asked. Here might be an explanation of how she had vanished. If she had been dealing directly with a pot hunter, he might have had second thoughts. Might have thought he had sold her evidence that would put him in prison. Might have killed her when she came back for more.

'She didn't mention any names,' Davis said.

'Hardly necessary,' Elliot said. 'Looking for pot hunters around Bluff, you'd go see Old Man Houk. Or one of his friends. Or hired hands.'

Bluff, Leaphorn thought. Maybe he would go there and talk to Houk. It must be the same Houk. The surviving father of the drowned murderer. The memories flooded back. Such tragedy burns deep into the brain.

'Something else you might need to know,' Davis said. 'Ellie had a pistol.'

Leaphorn waited.

'She kept it in the same drawer with that purse.'

'It wasn't there,' Leaphorn said.

'No. It wasn't,' Davis said. 'I guess she took it with her.'

Yes, Leaphorn thought. He would go to Bluff and talk to Houk. As Leaphorn remembered him, he was a most unusual man.

Chapter Seven

Ť ^ ť

JIM CHEE SAT on the edge of his bunk, rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, cleared his throat, and considered the uneasiness that had troubled his sleep. Too much death. The disturbed earth littered with too many bones. He put that thought aside. Was there enough water left in the tank of his little aluminum trailer to afford a shower? The answer was perhaps. But it wasn't a new problem. Chee long ago had developed a method for minimizing its effects. He filled his coffeepot ready for perking. He filled a drinking glass as a tooth-brushing reserve and a mustard jar for the sweat bath he was determined to take.

Chee climbed down the riverbank carrying the jar, a paper cup, and a tarpaulin. At his sweat bath in the willows beside the San Juan, he collected enough driftwood to heat his rocks, filled the cup with clean, dry sand, started his fire, and sat, legs crossed, waiting and thinking. No profit in thinking of Janet Pete--that encounter represented a humiliation that could be neither avoided nor minimized. Any way he figured it, the cost would be $900, plus Janet Pete's disdain. He thought instead of last night, of the two bodies being photographed, being loaded into the police van by the San Juan County deputies. He thought of the pots, carefully wrapped in newspapers inside the garbage bags.

When the rocks were hot enough and the fire had burned itself down to coals, he covered the sweat bath frame with the tarp, slid under it. He squatted, singing the sweat bath songs that the Holy People had taught the first clans, the songs to force contamination and sickness from the body. He savored the dry heat, conscious of muscles relaxing, perspiration seeping from his skin, trickling behind his ears, down his back, wet against his flanks. He poured a palmful of water from the jar into his hand and sprinkled it onto the rocks, engulfing himself in an explosion of steam. He inhaled this hot fog deeply, felt his body slick with moisture. He was dizzy now, free. Concern for bones and Buicks vanished in the hot darkness. Chee was conscious instead of his lungs at work, of open pores, supple muscles, of his own vigorous health. Here was his hozro--his harmony with what surrounded him.

When he threw back the tarp and emerged, rosy with body heat and streaming sweat, he felt light of head, light of foot, generally wonderful. He rubbed himself down with the sand he'd collected, climbed back to the trailer, and took his shower. Chee added to the desert dweller's habitual frugality with water the special caution that those who live in trailers re-learn each time they cover themselves with suds and find there's nothing left in the reservoir. He soaped a small area, rinsed it, then soaped another, hurried by the smell of his coffee perking. His Navajo, genes spared him the need to shave again for probably a week, but he shaved anyway. It was a way to delay the inevitable.

That was delayed a bit more by the lack of a telephone in Chee's trailer. He used the pay phone beside the convenience store on the highway. Janet Pete wasn't at her office. Maybe, the receptionist said, she had gone down to the Justice building, to the police station. She had been worried about her new car. Chee dialed the station. Three call-back messages for him, two from Janet Pete of DNA, the tribal legal service, one from Lieutenant Leaphorn. Leaphorn had just called and talked to Captain Largo. The captain then had left the message for Chee to call Leaphorn at his home number in Window Rock after 6:00 P.M. Had Pete left any messages? Yes, with the last call she had said to tell him she wanted to pick up her car.

Chee called Pete's home number. He tapped his fingers nervously as the telephone rang. There was a click.

'Sorry I can't come to the phone now,' Pete's voice said. 'If you will leave a message after the tone sounds, I will call you.'

Chee listened to the tone, and the silence following it. He could think of nothing sensible to say, and hung up. Then he drove over to Tso's garage. Surely the damage hadn't been as bad as he remembered.

The damage was exactly as he'd remembered. The car squatted on Tso's towing dolly, discolored with dust, the front wheel grotesquely misaligned, paint scraped from the fender, the little clips that once held Janet Pete's favorite chrome strip holding nothing. A small dent in the door. A large dent marring the robin's-egg blue of the rear fender. Looking crippled and dirty.

'Not so terrible,' Tso said. 'Nine fifty to eleven hundred dollars and it's good as it was. But she really ought to fix all those problems it had when you first drove it in.' Tso was wiping the grease from his hands in a gesture that reminded Chee of greedy anticipation. 'Crabby brakes, slack steering, all that.'

'I'm going to need some credit,' Chee said.

Tso thought about that, his face full of remembered debts, of friendships violated. Chee's thoughts of Tso, always warm, began turning cool. While they did, Janet Pete's motor pool sedan pulled up beside the building. The front door opened. Janet Pete emerged. She looked at the Buick, at two other cars awaiting Tso's ministrations, and gave Chee a dazzling smile.

'Where's my Buick?' she asked. 'How did it run? Did you…'

The question trailed off. Janet Pete looked again at the Buick.

'My God,' she said. 'Was anybody killed?'

'Well,' Chee said. He cleared his throat. 'You see, I was driving down…'

'Bad shocks,' Tso said. 'Slack steering. But Chee here took it out anyway. Sort of a safety check.' Tso shrugged, made a wry face. 'Could have been killed,' he said.

Which, if you thought about it right, was perhaps true, Chee thought. His displeasure with Tso was swept away by a wave of gratitude.

He made a depreciating gesture. 'I should have been more careful,' he said. `Tso warned me.'

Janet was staring at the Buick, reconciling what she saw with what she had left. 'They told me everything was fine,' she said.

'Odometer set back,' Tso said. 'Brake lining unevenly worn. U-joint loose. Steering loose. Needed lots of work.'

Janet Pete bit her lip. Thought. 'Can I use your telephone?'

Chee overheard only part of it. Getting past the salesman to the sales manager to the general manager. It seemed to Chee that the general manager mostly listened.

'Officer Chee doesn't seem to be too badly hurt, but I haven't heard from his lawyer… mechanic's list of defects shows… that's a third-degree misdemeanor in New Mexico, odometer tampering is. Yes, well, a jury can decide that for us. I think the fine is five thousand dollars. You can pick it up at Tso's garage in Shiprock. He tells me he won't release it until you pay his costs. Towing, inspection, I guess. My lawyer told me to make sure that none of your mechanics worked on it until he decides…'

On the way to get a cup of coffee in Janet Pete's motor pool sedan, Chee said, 'He'll have his mechanics fix everything.'

'Probably,' Janet said. 'Wouldn't be much of a lawsuit anyway. Not worth it.'

'Just letting him sweat a little?'

'You know, they wouldn't try that on you. You're a man. They pull that crap on women. They figure they can sell a woman on the baby blue paint and the chrome stripe. Sell us a lemon.'

'Um,' Chee said, which provoked a period of silence.

'What really happened?' Janet asked.

'Steering failed,' Chee said, feeling uneasy.

'Come on,' Janet said.

'Tried to make a turn,' Chee said. 'Missed it.'

'How fast? Come on. What was going on?'

So Jim Chee explained it, all about the missing trailer, and the missing backhoe, and Captain Largo, and that led to what he had found last night.

Janet had heard about it on the radio. Over coffee she was full of questions, not all of them about the crime.

'I heard you were a hatathali,' she said. `That you sing the Blessing Way.'

'I'm still learning,' Chee said. 'The only one I performed was in the family. A relative. But I know it now. If anybody wants one done.'

'How do you get time off? Isn't that a problem? Eight days, isn't it? Or do you sing the shorter version?'

'No problem yet. No customers.'

'Another thing I hear about you--you have a belagana girlfriend. A teacher over at Crownpoint.'

'She's gone away,' Chee said, and felt that odd sensation of hearing, from some external point, his voice saying the words. 'Gone away to be a graduate student in Wisconsin.'

'Oh,' Janet said.

'We write,' Chee said. 'I sent her a pregnant cat once.'

Janet looked surprised. 'Testing her patience?'

Chee tried to think how to explain it. A stupid thing to send to Mary Landon, stupid to mention it now.

'At the time I thought it had some symbolism,' he said.

Janet let the silence live, Navajo fashion. If he had more he wanted to say about Mary Landon and the cat, he would say it. He liked her for that. But he had nothing more to say.

'It was that cat you told me about? Last summer when you'd arrested that old man I was representing. The cat the coyote was after?'

Chee was stirring his coffee, head down but conscious that Janet Pete was studying him. He nodded, remembering. Janet Pete had suggested he provide his stray cat with a coyote-proof home and they had gone to a Farmington pet store and bought one of those plastic and wire cages used to ship pets on airliners. He had used it, eventually, to ship the abandoned white man's cat back to the white man's world.

'Symbolism,' Janet Pete said. Now she was stirring her coffee, looking down at the swirl the spoon made.

To the top of her head, Chee said: 'Belagana cat can't adapt to the Navajo ways. Starves. Eaten by coyote. My stray cat experiment fails. I accept the failure. Cat goes back to the world of the belaganas, where there's more to eat and the coyote doesn't get you.' It was more than Chee had intended to say. He was torn. He wanted to talk about Mary Landon, about the going away of Mary Landon. But he wasn't comfortable talking about it to Janet Pete.

'She didn't want to stay on the reservation. You didn't want to leave,' Janet Pete said. 'You are saying you understand her problem.'

'Our problem,' Chee said. 'My problem.'

Janet Pete sipped her coffee. 'Mine was a law professor. Assistant professor, to be technical.' She put the cup down and considered. 'You know,' she said, 'maybe it was the same symbolic cat problem. Let me see if I can make it fit.'

Chee waited. Like Mary Landon, Janet Pete had large, expressive eyes. Dark brown instead of blue. Now they were surrounded by frown lines as Janet Pete thought.

'Doesn't fit so well,' she said. 'He wanted a helpmate.' She laughed. 'Adam's rib. Something to hold back the loneliness of the young man pursuing his brilliant career at law. The Indian maiden.' The words sounded bitter, but she smiled at Chee. 'You remember. Few years ago, Indian maidens were in with the Yuppies. Like squash-blossom necklaces and declaring yourself to be part Cherokee or Sioux if you wanted to write romantic poetry.'

'Not so much now,' Chee said. 'I gather you agreed to disagree.'

'Not really,' she said. 'The offer remains open. Or so he tells me.'

'Fits in a way,' Chee said. 'I wanted her to be my Navajo.'

'She was a schoolteacher? At Crownpoint?'

'For three years,' Chee said.

'But didn't want to make a career out of it. I can see her point.'

'That wasn't exactly the problem. It was raising kids out here. More than that, too. I could leave. Had an offer from the FBI. Better money. Sort of a choice involved, as she saw it. Did I want her enough to quit being a Navajo?'

Outside the dusty front window of the Navajo Nation Cafe the dazzling late-day sunlight turned dark with cloud shadow. A Ford 250 pickup rolled past slowly, its front seat crowded with four Navajos, its rear bumper crowded by the van of an impatient tourist. Chee caught the eye of the waitress and got their coffees refilled. What would he say if Janet Pete pressed the question. If she said: 'Well, do you?' what would he say?

Instead, she stirred her coffee.

'How has the professor's brilliant career developed?' Chee asked.

'Brilliantly. He's now chief legal counsel of Davidson-Bart, which I understand is what is called a multinational conglomerate. But mostly involved with the commercial credit end of export-import business. Makes money. Lives in Arlington.'

Through the dusty window came the faint sound of thunder, a rumble that faded away.

'Wish it would rain,' Janet Pete said.

Chee had been thinking exactly the same thing. Sharing a Navajo thought with another Navajo. 'Too late to rain,' he said. 'It's October thirty-first.'

Janet Pete dropped him at the garage. He stopped at the station to call Lieutenant Leaphorn on his way back to the trailer.

'Largo told me you found the bodies of those pot hunters,' Leaphorn said. 'He was a little vague about what you were doing out there.'

He left the question implied and Chee thought a moment before answering. He knew Leaphorn's wife had died. He'd heard the man was having trouble coping with that. He'd heard-- everybody in the Navajo Tribal Police had heard--that Leaphorn had quit the force. Retired. So what was he doing in this affair? How official was this? Chee exhaled, taking another second for thought. He thought, quit or not, this is still Joe Leaphorn. Our legendary Leaphorn.

'I was looking for that fellow who stole that backhoe here at Shiprock,' Chee said. 'I found out he was a pot hunter now and then, and I was trying to catch him out digging. With the stolen property.'

'And you knew where to look?' Leaphorn, Chee remembered, never believed in coincidence.

'Some guessing,' Chee said. 'But I knew what gas company he worked for, and where his job would have taken him, and where there might be some sites in the places he would have been.'

The word that spread among the four hundred employees of the Navajo Tribal Police was that Joe Leaphorn had lost it. Joe Leaphorn had a nervous breakdown. Joe Leaphorn was out of it. To Jim Chee, Leaphorn's voice sounded no different. Neither did the tone of his questions. A kind of skepticism. As if he knew he wasn't being told all he needed to know. What would Leaphorn ask him now? How he knew the man would be digging last night?

'You have anything else to go on?'

'Oh,' Chee said. 'Sure. We knew he rented a truck with new tires on double back wheels.'

'Okay,' Leaphorn said. 'Good. So there were tracks to look for.' Now his voice sounded more relaxed. 'Makes a lot of difference. Otherwise you spend the rest of your life out there running down the roads.'

'And I figured he might be out digging last night because of something he said to Slick Nakai. The preacher bought pots from him, now and then. And he sort of told the preacher he'd have some for him quick,' Chee said.

Silence.

'Did you know I'm on leave? Terminal leave?'

'I heard it,' Chee said.

'Ten more days and I'm a civilian. Right now, matter of fact, I guess I'm unofficial.'

'Yes sir,' Chee said.

'If you can make it tomorrow, would you drive out there to the site with me? Look it over with me in daylight. Tell me how it was before the sheriffs people and the ambulance and the FBI screwed everything up.'

'If it's okay with the captain,' Chee said, 'I'd be happy to go.'

Chapter Eight

Ť ^ ť

LEAPHORN HAD BEEN AWARE of the wind most of the night, listening to it blow steadily from the southeast as he waited for sleep, awakening again and again to notice it shifting, and gusting, making chindi sounds around the empty house. It was still blowing when Thatcher arrived to pick him up, buffeting Thatcher's motor pool sedan.

'Cold front coming through,' Thatcher said. 'It'll die down.'

And as they drove northward from Window Rock it moderated. At Many Farms they stopped for breakfast, Thatcher reminiscing about Harrison Houk, cattleman, pillar of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, potent Republican, subject of assorted gossip, county commissioner, holder of Bureau of Land Management grazing permits sprawling across the southern Utah canyon country, legendary shrewd operator. Leaphorn mostly listened, remembering Houk from long ago, remembering a man stricken. When they paid their check, the western sky over Black Mesa was bleak with suspended dust but the wind was down. Fifty miles later as they crossed the Utah border north of Mexican Water, it was no more than a breeze, still from the southeast but almost too faint to stir the sparse gray sage and the silver cheat grass of the Nokaito Bench. The sedan rolled across the San Juan River bridge below Sand Island in a dead calm. Only the smell of dust recalled the wind.

'Land of Little Rain,' Thatcher said. 'Who called it that?'

It wasn't the sort of friendship that needed answers. Leaphorn looked upstream, watching a small flotilla of rubber kayaks, rafts, and wooden dories pushing into the stream from the Sand Island launching site. A float expedition down into the deep canyons. He and Emma had talked of doing that. She would have loved it, getting him away from any possibility of telephone calls. Getting him off the end of the earth. And he would have loved it, too. Always intended to do it but there was never enough time. And now, of course, the time was all used up.

'One of your jobs?' Leaphorn asked, nodding toward the flotilla below.

'We license them as tour boatmen. Sell `em trip permits, make sure they meet the safety rules. So forth.' He nodded toward the stream. 'That must be the last one of the season. They close the river down just about now.'

'Big headache?'

'Not this bunch,' Thatcher said. 'This is Wild Rivers Expeditions out of Bluff. Pros. More into selling education. Take you down with a geologist to study the formations and the fossils, or with an anthropologist to look at the Anasazi ruins up the canyons, or maybe with a biologist to get you into the lizards and lichens and the bats. That sort of stuff. Older people go. More money. Not a bunch of overaged adolescents hoping to get scared shitless going down the rapids.'

Leaphorn nodded.

'Take great pride in cleaning up after themselves. The drill now is urinate right beside the river, so it dilutes it fast. Everything else they carry out. Portable toilets. Build their camp fires in fireboxes so you don't get all that carbon in the sand. Even carry out the ashes.'

They turned upriver toward Bluff. Off the reservation now. Out of Leaphorn's jurisdiction and into Thatcher's. Much of the land above the bluffs lining the river would be federal land -- public domain grazing leases. The land along the river had been homesteaded by the Mormon families who'd settled this narrow valley on orders from Brigham Young to form an outpost against the hostile Gentile world. This stony landscape south of the river had been Leaphorn's country once, when he was young and worked out of Kayenta, but it was too waterless and barren to support the people who would require police attention.

History said 250 Mormons had settled the place in the 1860s, and the last census figures Leaphorn had seen showed its current population was 240--three service stations strung along the highway, three roadside cafes, two groceries, two motels, the office and boathouse of Wild Rivers Expeditions, a school, a ward meetinghouse, and a scattering of houses, some of them empty. The years hadn't changed much at Bluff.

Houk's ranch house was the exception. Leaphorn remembered it as a big, solid block of a building, formed of cut pink sandstone, square as a die and totally neat. It had been connected to the gravel road from Bluff by a graded dirt driveway, which led through an iron gate, curved over a sagebrush-covered rise, and ended under the cottonwoods that shaded the house. Leaphorn noticed the difference at the gate, painted then, rusted now. He unlatched it, refastened it after Thatcher drove through. Then he pulled the chain, which slammed the clapper against the big iron church bell suspended on the pole that took the electric line to the house. That told Houk he had visitors.

The driveway now was rutted, with a growth of tumbleweeds, wild asters, and cheat grass along the tracks. The rabbit fence, which Leaphorn remembered surrounding a neat and lush front yard garden, was sagging now and the garden a tangle of dry country weeds. The pillars that supported the front porch needed paint. So did the pickup truck parked beside the porch. Only the solid square shape of the house, built to defy time, hadn't been changed by the years. But now, surrounded by decay, it stood like a stranger. Even the huge barn on the slope behind it, despite its stone walls, seemed to sag.

Thatcher let the sedan roll to a stop in the shade of the cottonwood. The screen door opened and Houk appeared. He was leaning on a cane. He squinted from the shadows into blinding sunlight, trying to identify who had rung the yard bell. At first look, Leaphorn thought that Houk, like the pink sandstone of his house, had been proof against time. Despite the cane, his figure in the shadow of the porch had the blocky sturdiness Leaphorn remembered. There was still the round bulldog face, the walrus mustache, the small eyes peering through wire-rimmed glasses. But now Leaphorn saw the paunch, the slight slump, the deepened lines, the grayness, the raggedness of the mustache which hid his mouth. And as Houk shifted his weight against the cane, Leaphorn saw the grimace of pain cross his face.

'Well, now, Mr. Thatcher,' Houk said, recognizing him. 'What brings the Bureau of Land Management all the way out here so soon? Wasn't it only last spring you was out here to see me?' And then he saw Leaphorn. 'And who…' he began, and stopped. His expression shifted from neutral, to surprise, to delight.

'By God,' he said. 'I don't remember your name, but you're the Navajo policeman who found my boy's hat.' Houk stopped. 'Yes I do. It was Leaphorn.'

It was Leaphorn's turn for surprise. Almost twenty years since he'd been involved in the hunt for Houk's boy. He had talked to Houk only two or three times, and only briefly. Giving him the wet blue felt hat, soggy with muddy San Juan River water. Standing beside him under the alcove in the cliff that tense moment when the state police captain decided they had Brigham Houk cornered. And finally, on this very porch when it was all over and no hope remained, listening to the man examine his conscience, finding in his own flaws the blame for his boy's murderous rage. Three meetings, and a long, long time ago.

Houk ushered them into what he called the parlor, a neat room that smelled of furniture polish. 'Don't use this room much,' Houk said loudly, and he pulled back the curtains, raised the blinds, and pushed up the sash windows to admit the autumn. But the room was still dim-- its walls a gallery of framed photographs of people, of bookshelves lined mostly with pots. 'Don't get much company,' Houk concluded. He sat himself in the overstuffed armchair that matched the sofa, creating another faint puff of dust. 'In just a minute the girl will be in here with something cold to drink.' He waited then, his fingers tapping at the chair arm. It was their turn to speak.

'We're looking for a woman,' Thatcher began. 'Anthropologist named Eleanor Friedman-Bernal.'

Houk nodded. 'I know her.' He looked surprised. 'What she do?'

'She's been missing,' Thatcher said. 'For a couple of weeks.' He thought about what he wanted to say next. 'Apparently she came out here just a little while before she disappeared. To Bluff. Did you see her?'

'Let's see now. I'd say it was three, four weeks when she was out here last,' Houk said. 'Something like that. Maybe I could figure it out exactly.'

'What did she want?'

It seemed to Leaphorn that Houk's face turned slightly pinker than its usual hue. He stared at Thatcher, his lip moving under the mustache, his fingers still drumming.

'You fellas didn't take long to get out here,' he said. 'I'll say that for you.' He pushed himself up in the chair, then sat back down again. 'But how the hell you connect it with me?'

'You mean her being missing?' Thatcher said, puzzled. 'She had your name down in her notes.'

'I meant the killings,' Houk said.

'Killings?' Leaphorn asked.

'Over in New Mexico,' Houk said. 'The pot hunters. It was on the radio this morning.'

'You think we're connecting those with you?' Leaphorn asked. 'Why do you think that?'

'Because it seems to me that every time the feds start thinking about pot stealing, they come nosing around here,' Houk said. 'Those folks get shot stealing pots, stands to reason it's going to get the BLM cops, and the FBI, and all off their butts and working. Since they don't know what the hell they're doing, they bother me.' Houk surveyed them, his small blue eyes magnified by the lenses of his glasses.

'You fellas telling me this visit hasn't nothing to do with that?'

'That's what we're telling you,' Leaphorn said. 'We're trying to find an anthropologist. A woman named Eleanor Friedman-Bernal. She disappeared the thirteenth of October. Some references in her notes about coming out here to Bluff to see Mr. Harrison Houk. We thought if we knew what she came out here to see you about, it might tell us something about where to look next.'

Houk thought about it, assessing them. 'She came to see me about a pot,' he said.

Leaphorn sat, waiting for his silence to encourage Houk to add to that. But Thatcher was not a Navajo.

'A pot?'

'To do with her research,' Houk said. 'She'd seen a picture of it in a Nelson auction catalog. You know about that outfit? And it was the kind she's interested in. So she called `em, and talked to somebody or other, and they told her they'd got it from me.' Houk paused, waiting for Thatcher's question.

'What did she want to know?'

'Exactly where I found it. I didn't find it. I bought it off a Navajo. I give her his name.'

A middle-aged Navajo woman came into the room, carrying a tray with three water glasses, a pitcher of what appeared to be ice water, and three cans of Hires root beer.

'Drinking water or root beer,' Houk said. 'I guess you knew I'm Latter-day Saints.'

Everybody took water.

'Irene,' Houk said. 'You want to meet these fellas. This is Mr. Thatcher here. The one from the BLM who comes out here now and then worrying us about our grazing rights. And this fella here is the one I've told you about. The one that found Brigham's hat. The one that kept those goddam state policemen from shooting up into that alcove. This is Irene Musket.'

Irene put down the tray and held her hand out to Thatcher. 'How do you do,' she said. She spoke in Navajo to Leaphorn, using the traditional words, naming her mother's clan, the Towering House People, and her father's, the Paiute Dineh. She didn't hold out her hand. He wouldn't expect it. This touching of strangers was a white man's custom that some traditional Navajos found difficult to adopt.

'You remember what day it was that anthropology woman was out here?' Houk asked her. 'Almost a month ago, I think.'

Irene considered. 'On a Friday,' she said. 'Four weeks ago last Friday.' She picked up the tray and left.

'Great friend of my wife, Irene was. After Alice passed on, Irene stayed on and looked after things,' Houk said.

They sipped the cold water. Behind Houk's gray head, the wall was lined with photographs. Houk and his wife and their children clustered on the front porch. Brigham, the youngest, standing in front. The brother and sister he was destined to kill standing behind him, smiling over his shoulders. Brigham's mouth looked slightly twisted, as if he had been ordered to smile. Houk's face was happy, boyish. His wife looked tired, strain showing in the lines around her mouth. A wedding picture, the bride with the veil raised above her face, Houk with the mustache much smaller, older couples flanking them, A picture of Brigham on a horse, his smile strained and lopsided. A picture of the sister in a cheerleader's uniform. Of the brother in a Montezuma Creek High School football jacket. Of Brigham holding up a dead bobcat by its back legs, his eyes intense. Of Houk in an army uniform. Of the Houks and another couple. But mostly the pictures were of the three children. Dozens of them, at all ages. In most of them, Brigham stood alone, rarely smiling. In three of them, he stood over a deer. In one, over a bear. Leaphorn remembered Houk talking endlessly on the porch the day Brigham had drowned.

'Always outdoors,' Houk had said. 'From the very littlest. Shy as a Navajo. Wasn't happy around people. We shouldn't have made him go to school there. We should have gotten him some help.'

Now Houk put down his glass. Thatcher asked, 'When she left here, was she going to see the Navajo? The one who found the pot?'

'I reckon,' Houk said. 'That was her intention. She wanted to know where he got it. All I knew is what he told me. That he didn't break any law getting it.' Houk was talking directly to Thatcher. 'Didn't get it off public domain land, or off the reservation. Got to be off private land or I won't have nothing to do with it.'

'What was his name?' Thatcher asked.

'Fella named Jimmy Etcitty,' Houk said.

'Live around here?'

'South, I think,' Houk said. 'Across the border in Arizona. Between Tes Nez lah and Din-nehotso, I think he said.' Houk stopped. It seemed to Leaphorn that it was to decide whether he had told them enough. And this time Thatcher didn't interrupt the silence. Houk thought. They waited. Leaphorn studied the room. Everything was dusty except the piano. It glowed with wax. Like most of the bookshelves, a shelf above the piano was lined with pots.

'I think I told her she should stop at the Dinnehotso Chapter House and ask how to get to the Mildred Roanhorse outfit,' Houk added. 'Etcitty's her son-in-law.'

'I noticed in the Nelson catalog that they give the customer some sort of documentation on their artifacts,' Leaphorn said. He left the question implied, and Houk let it hang a moment while he thought about how to answer it.

'They do,' Houk said. 'If I happen to find something myself--or sometimes when I have personal knowledge where it came from--then I fill out this sort of statement, time and place and all that, and I sign it and send it along. Case like this, I just give the documentation form to the finder--whoever I'm buying it from. I have them fill it in and sign it.'

'You show that paper to the lady?' Leaphorn asked.

'Didn't have it,' Houk said. 'Usually I just have the finder send the letter directly to whoever is buying from me. This case, I gave Etcitty the Nelson form and told him to take care of it.'

They sat and considered this.

'Cuts out the middleman on that,' Houk said.

And, Leaphorn thought, insulates Harrison Houk from any charge of fraud.

'Might as well get it from the horse's mouth,' Houk added, somberly. But he winked at Leaphorn.

There was still plenty of the day left to drive south to the Dinnehotso Chapter House and get directions to the Mildred Roanhorse outfit and find Jimmy Etcitty. On the porch Houk touched Leaphorn's sleeve.

'Always wanted to say something to you about what you did,' he said. 'That evening I wasn't in any condition to think about it. But it was a kindly thing. And brave too.'

'It was just my job,' Leaphorn said. 'That highway patrolman was a traffic man. Green about that kind of work. And scared too, I guess. Somebody needed to keep it cool.'

'Turned out it didn't matter,' Houk said. 'Brigham wasn't hiding up there anyway. I guess he was already drowned by then. But I thank you.'

Thatcher was standing at the foot of the steps, waiting and hearing all this. Embarrassing. But he didn't bring it up until they were out of Bluff driving toward Mexican Water into the blinding noontime sun.

'Didn't know you were involved in that Houk case,' he said. He shook his head. 'Hell of a thing. The boy was crazy, wasn't he?'

'That's what they said. Schizophrenia. Heard voices. Unhappy around anyone but his dad. A loner. But Houk told me he was great at music.

That piano in there, that was the boy's. Houk said he was good at it and played the guitar and the clarinet.'

'But dangerous,' Thatcher said. 'Ought to been put in a hospital. Locked up until he was safe.'

'I remember that's what Houk said they should've done. He said his wife wanted to, but he wouldn't do it. Said he thought it would kill the boy. Locking him up. Said he wasn't happy except when he was outdoors.'

'What'd you do to make such an impression on Houk?'

'Found the boy's hat,' Leaphorn said. 'Washed up on the reservation side of the river. It was already pretty clear he'd tried to swim across.'

Thatcher drove for a while. Turned on the radio. 'Catch the noon news,' he said. 'See what they got to say about those pot hunters getting^ shot.'

'Good,' Leaphorn said.

'There was more to it than that,' Thatcher said. 'More than finding his goddamned hat.'

Might as well get it over with. The memories had been flooding back anyway -- another of those many things a policeman accumulates in the mind and cannot erase. 'You remember the case,' Leaphorn said. 'Houk and one of his hired hands came home that night, and found the bodies, and the youngest boy, Brigham, missing, with some of his stuff. And the shotgun he'd done it with was missing too. Big excitement. Houk was even more important then than he is now -- legislator and all that. Bunches of men out everywhere looking. This Utah highway patrol officer -- a captain or lieutenant or something -- he and a bunch he was handling thought they had the boy cornered in a sort of alcove-cave up in a box canyon. Saw something or heard something, and I guess the kid had used the place before as a sort of hangout. Anyway, they'd called for him to come out, and no answer, so this dumb captain is going to have everybody shoot into there, and I said first I'd get a little closer and see what I could see, and turned out nobody was in there.'

Thatcher looked at him.

'No big deal,' Leaphorn said. 'Nobody was there.'

'So you didn't get shot with a shotgun.'

'I happened to have a pretty clear idea of how far a shotgun will shoot. Not very far.'

'Yeah,' Thatcher said.

The tone irritated Leaphorn. 'Hell, man,' he said. 'The boy was only fourteen.'

Thatcher had no comment on that. The woman reading the noon news had gotten to the pot hunter shooting. The San Juan County Sheriffs Office said they had no suspects in the case as yet but they did have promising leads. Casts had been made of the tire tracks of a vehicle believed used by the killer. Both victims had now been identified. They were Joe B. Nails, thirty-one, a former employee of Wellserve in Farmington, and Jimmy Etcitty, thirty-seven, whose address was given as Dinnehotso Chapter House on the Navajo Reservation.

'Well now,' Thatcher said. 'I guess we can skip stopping at Dinnehotso.'

Chapter Nine

Ť ^ ť

THIS is JUST ABOUT where they'd left the U-Haul truck parked,' Chee said. He turned off the ignition, set the parking brake. 'Pulled up to the edge of the slope with the winch cable run out. Apparently they eased the backhoe down on the cable.'

The front of Chee's pickup was pointed down the steep slope. Fifty feet below, the grassy, brushy hump where a little Anasazi pueblo had stood a thousand years ago was a chaos of trenches, jumbled stones, and what looked like broken sticks. Bones reflecting white in the sunlight.

'Where was the backhoe?'

Chee pointed. 'See the little juniper? At the end of that shallow trench there.'

'The sheriff hauled everything off, I guess,' Leaphorn said. 'After they got their photographs.'

'That was the plan when I left.'

Leaphorn didn't comment. He sat silently, considering the destruction below. This ridge was much higher than it had seemed to Chee in the darkness. Shiprock stuck up like a blue thumb on the western horizon seventy miles away. Behind it, the dim outline of the Carrizo Mountains formed the last margin of the planet. The sagebrush flats between were dappled with the shadow of clouds, drifting eastward under the noon sun.

'The bodies,' Leaphorn said. 'The belagana in the backhoe? Right? Named Nails. And the Navajo partway up this slope under us? Jimmy Etcitty. Which one was shot first?'

Chee opened his mouth, closed it. His impulse had been to say the coroner would have to decide. Or about the same time. But he realized what Leaphorn wanted.

'I'd guess the Navajo was running for his life,' he said. 'I'd say he'd seen the white man shot in the machine. He was running for the truck.'

'Do much checking before you called it in to the sheriff?'

'Hardly any,' Chee said.

'But some,' Leaphorn said.

'Very little.'

'The killer parked up here?'

'Down by the oil well pump.'

'Tire tracks mean anything?'

'Car or pickup. Some wear.' Chee shrugged. 'Dusty dry and in the dark. Couldn't tell much.'

'How about his tracks? Or hers?'

'He parked on the sandstone. No tracks right at the vehicle. After that, mostly scuff marks.'

'Man?'

'Probably. I don't know.' Chee was remembering how shaken he had been. Too much death. He hadn't been using his head. Now he felt guilty. Had he concentrated, he surely could have found at least something to indicate shoe size.

'Not much use going over it again,' Leaphorn said. 'Too many deputy sheriffs and paramedics and photographers been trampling around.'

And so they scrambled down the hill--Leaphorn losing his footing and sliding twenty feet in a shower of dislodged earth and gravel. Standing there, amid the dislodged stones, amid the scattered bones, Chee felt the familiar uneasiness. Too many chindi had taken to the air here, finding freedom from the bodies that had housed them. Leaphorn was standing at a narrow trench the backhoe had dug beside a crumbled wall, looking thoughtful. But then Leaphorn didn't believe in chindi, or in anything else.

'You studied anthropology, didn't you? At New Mexico?'

'Right,' Chee said. So had Leaphorn, if the word around the Navajo Tribal Police was true. At Arizona State. A BA and an MS.

'Get into the Anasazi much? The archaeological end of it?'

'A little,' Chee said.

'The point is, whoever did this work knew something about what he was doing,' Leaphorn said. 'Anasazi usually buried their dead in the trash midden with the garbage, or right against the walls, sometimes inside the rooms. This guy worked the midden…' Leaphorn gestured to the torn earth beyond them. 'And he worked along the walls. So I'd guess he knew they buried pottery with their corpses, and he knew where to find the graves.'

Chee nodded.

'And maybe he knew this was a late site, and that--rule of thumb--the later the site, the better the pot. Glazed, multicolored, decorated, so forth.' He bent, picked up a shard of broken pottery the size of his hand and inspected it.

'Most of the stuff I've seen here is like this,' he said, handing the shard to Chee. 'Recognize it?'

The interior surface was a rough gray. Under its coating of dust the exterior glowed a glossy rose, with ghostly lines of white wavering through it. Chee touched the glazed surface to his tongue--the automatic reaction of a former anthropology student to a potsherd--and inspected the clean spot. A nice color, but his memory produced nothing more than a confused jumble of titles: Classical. Pueblo III. Incised. Corrugated, etc. He handed the shard to Leaphorn, shook his head.

'It's a type called St. John's Polychrome,' Leaphorn said. 'Late stuff. There's a theory it originated in one of the Chaco outlier villages. I think they're pretty sure it was used for trading.'

Chee was impressed and his face showed it.

Leaphorn chuckled. 'I can't remember stuff like that either,' he said. 'I've been doing some reading.'

'Oh?'

'We seem to have a sort of overlap here,' he said. 'You were looking for a couple of men who stole our backhoe. I'm looking for an anthropologist. A woman who works at Chaco and took off one day three weeks ago to go to Farmington and never came back.'

'Hadn't heard about that,' Chee said.

'She prepared this big, elaborate dinner. Had a guest coming to visit. A man very important to her. She put it in the fridge and she didn't come back.' Leaphorn had been looking out across the grassland toward the distant thunderheads. It must have occurred to him that this would sound strange to Chee. He glanced at him. 'It's a San Juan County missing person's case,' he said. 'But I'm on leave, and it sounded interesting.'

'You mentioned you were quitting,' Chee said. 'I mean resigning.'

'I'm on terminal leave,' Leaphorn said. 'A few more days and I'm a civilian.'

Chee could think of nothing to say. He didn't particularly like Leaphorn, but he respected him.

'But I'm not a civilian yet,' he added, 'and what we have here is peculiar. This overlap, I mean. We have Dr. Friedman-Bernal being a ferocious collector of this kind of pottery.' Leaphorn tapped the potsherd with his forefinger. 'We have Jimmy Etcitty killed here digging up this sort of pot. This same Jimmy Etcitty worked over at Chaco where Friedman-Bernal worked. This same Jimmy Etcitty found a pot somewhere near Bluff which he sold to a collector who sold it to an auction house. This pot got Friedman-Bernal excited enough a month ago to send her driving to Bluff looking for Etcitty. And on top of that we have Friedman-Bernal buying from Slick Nakai, the evangelist, and Nails selling to Slick, and Etcitty playing guitar for Nakai.'

Chee waited, but Leaphorn seemed to have nothing to add.

'I didn't know any of that,' Chee said. 'Just knew Nails and a friend stole the backhoe when I was supposed to be watching the maintenance yard.'

'Nice little tangle of strings, and right here is the knot,' Leaphorn said.

And none of it any of Leaphorn's business, Chee thought. Not if he had resigned. So why was he out here, sitting on that stone wall with his legs in the sun, with almost two hundred miles of driving already behind him today? He must enjoy it or he wouldn't be here. So why has he resigned?

'Why did you resign?' Chee asked. 'None of my business, I guess, but…'

Leaphorn seemed to be thinking about it. Almost as if for the first time. He glanced at Chee, shrugged. 'I guess I'm tired,' he said.

'But you're using leave time out here, chasing after whatever it is we have here.'

'I've been wondering about that myself,' Leaphorn said. 'Maybe it's the fire horse syndrome. Lifelong habit at work. I think it's because I'd like to find this Friedman-Bernal woman. I'd like to find her and sit her down and say: `Dr. Bernal, why did you prepare that big dinner and then go away and let it rot in your refrigerator?''

To Chee, the answer to why Dr. Bernal let her dinner spoil was all too easy. Especially now. Dr. Bernal was dead.

'You think she's still alive?'

Leaphorn considered. 'After what we have here, it doesn't seem likely, does it?'

'No,' Chee said.

'Unless she did it,' Leaphorn said. 'She had a pistol. She took it with her when she left Chaco.'

'What caliber?' Chee asked. 'I heard this one was small.'

'All I know is small,' Leaphorn said. 'Small handgun. She carried it in her purse.'

'Sounds like twenty-two caliber,' Chee said. 'Or maybe a twenty-five or a small thirty-two.'

Leaphorn rose, stiffly, to his feet. Stretched his back, flexed his shoulders. 'Let's see what we can find,' he said.

They found relatively little. The investigators from the county had taken the bodies and whatever else had interested them, which probably hadn't been much. The victims seemed to be clearly identified, and that would be checked with people who knew them for confirmation. The FBI would be asked to do a run on their fingerprints, just in case. The backhoe had been hauled away and would be gone over carefully for prints in the event the killer had been careless with his hands when he shot Nails. The rental truck would receive the same treatment. So would the two plastic sacks in which Chee had seen the pots carefully packed. And just in case, a cord had been run around the dig site, with the little tags dangling to warn citizens away from a homicide site. If some afterthought brought an investigator back to check on something, nothing would be disturbed.

What interested Chee was outside the cord--a new cardboard carton bearing the red legend SUPERTUFF and the sublegend WASTEBASKET LINERS, and several other messages: 'Why Pay More For Something You'll Throw Away? Six free in this carton. Thirty for the price of twenty-four!'

The cardboard was smudged with white. Chee squatted beside it and recognized fingerprint powder. Someone had checked it and found the cardboard too rough to show prints. Chee picked it up, extracted the carefully folded plastic sacks. Counted them. Twenty-seven. Twenty-seven plus two filled with pots made twenty-nine. He slipped the sacks back into the box and replaced it. One sack unaccounted for. Filled with what? Had the killer taken one set of pots and left the other two? Had Nails's girlfriend, if he had a girlfriend, borrowed one? It was one of those imponderables.

He watched Leaphorn prowling along the trenches, inspecting digging procedures, or perhaps the human bones. Chee had been avoiding the bones without realizing it. Now almost at his foot he noticed the weathered flat surface of a scapula, broken off below the shoulder joint. Just beyond was a very small skull, complete except for the lower jaw. A child, Chee guessed, unless the Anasazi had been even smaller than he remembered. Beyond the skull, partly buried by the excavation dirt, were ribs, and part of a spinal column, the small bones of a foot, three lower jaws placed in a row.

Chee stared. Why had that happened? He strolled over and looked down at them. One was broken, a small jaw with part of its left side missing. The other two were complete. Adult, Chee guessed. An expert would be able to tell the sex of their owners, the approximate ages at death, something about their diet. But why had someone lined them up like this? One of the pot hunters, Chee guessed. It didn't seem the sort of thing one of the deputies would have done. Then Chee noticed another jawbone, and three more, and finally a total of seventeen within a few yards of the juniper where he was standing. He could see only three craniums. Someone-- again surely the pot hunters--had sorted out the jaws. Why? Chee walked over to where Leaphorn was standing, studying something in the trench.

'Find anything?' Leaphorn asked, without looking up.

'Nothing much,' Chee said. 'One of those plastic bags seems to be missing.'

Leaphorn looked up at him.

'The box said contents thirty. There were still twenty-seven folded in it. I saw two with pots in them.'

'Interesting,' Leaphorn said. 'We'll ask about that at the sheriff's office. Maybe they took one.'

'Maybe,' Chee said.

'You notice anything about the skeletons?' Leaphorn was squatting now in the shallow trench, examining bones.

'Somebody seemed to be interested in the jawbones,' Chee said.

'Yes,' Leaphorn said. 'Now why would that be?' He stood up, holding in both hands a small skull. It was gray with the clay of the grave, and the jaw was missing. 'Why in the world would that be?'

Chee had not the slightest idea, and said so.

Leaphorn bent into the grave again, poking at something with a stick. 'I think this is what they call a Chaco outlier site,' he said. 'Same people who lived in the great houses over in the canyon, or probably the same. I think there is some evidence, or at least a theory, that these outliers traded back and forth with the great-house people, maybe came into Chaco for their religious ceremonials. Nobody really knows. This was probably one of the sites being reserved for digging sometime in the future.' He sounded, Chee thought, like an anthropology lecturer.

'You have anything pressing to do in Shiprock tonight?' Chee denied it with a negative motion of his head.

'How about stopping off at the Chaco Center on the way home then,' Leaphorn said. 'Let's see what we can find out about this.'

Chapter Ten

Ť ^ ť

FROM THE DESPOILED OUTLIER SITE to the eastern boundary of the Chaco Culture National Historic Park would be less than twenty-five miles if a road existed across the dry hills and Chaco Mesa. None did. By the oil company roads that carried Leaphorn and Chee back to Highway 44, thence northwest to Nageezi, and then southwest over the bumpy dirt aceess route, it was at least sixty miles. They arrived at the visitors' center just after sundown, found it closed for the day, and drove up to the foot of the bluff where employee housing was located. The Luna family was starting supper -- the superintendent, his wife, a son of perhaps eleven, and a daughter a year or two younger. Supper centered on an entree involving macaroni, cheese, tomatoes, and things that Leaphorn could not readily identify. That he and Chee would eat was a foregone conclusion. Good manners demanded the disclaimer of hunger from the wayfarer, but the geography of the Colorado Plateau made it an obvious lie. Out here there was literally no place to stop to eat. And so they dined, Leaphorn noticing that Chee's appetite was huge and that his own had returned. Perhaps it was the smell of the home cooking--something he hadn't enjoyed since Emma's sickness reached the point where it was no longer prudent for her to be in the kitchen.

Bob Luna's wife, a handsome woman with a friendly, intelligent face, was full of questions about Eleanor Friedman-Bernal. After polite feelers established that questions were not out of order, she asked them. The Luna son, Allen, a blond, profusely freckled boy who looked like a small copy of his blond and freckled mother, put down his fork and listened. His sister listened without interrupting her supper.

'We haven't learned much,' Leaphorn said. 'Maybe the county has done better. It is their jurisdiction. But I doubt it. No sheriff ever has enough officers. In San Juan County it's worse than normal. You're worried to death with everything from vandalism of summer cabins up on Navajo Lake to people tapping distillate out of the gas pipelines, or stealing oil field equipment, things like that. Too much territory. Too few people. So missing persons don't get worked on.' He stopped, surprised at hearing himself deliver this defense of the San Juan County Sheriffs Office. Usually he was complaining about it. 'Anyway,' he added, lamely, 'we haven't learned anything very useful.'

'Where could she have gone?' Mrs. Luna said. Obviously it was something she had often thought about. 'So early in the morning. She told us she was going to Farmington, and got the mail we had going out, and our shopping lists, and then just vanished.' She glanced from Chee to Leaphorn and back. 'I'm afraid it isn't going to have a happy ending. I'm afraid Ellie got in over her head with a man we don't know about.' She attempted a smile. 'I guess that sounds odd--to say that about a woman her age--but at this place, it's so small--so few of us live here, I mean--that everybody tells everybody everything. It's the only thing we have to be interested in. One another.'

Luna laughed. 'It's pretty hard to have secrets here,' he said. 'You have experienced our telephone. You don't get any secret calls. And you don't get any secret mail--unless it happens to show up at Blanco the day you happen to pick it up.' He laughed again. 'And it would be pretty hard to have any secret visitors.'

But not impossible, Leaphorn thought. No more impossible than driving out to make your calls away from here, or setting up a post office box in Farmington.

'You just get to know everything by accident even if people don't mention it,' Mrs. Luna said. 'For example, going places. I hadn't thought to tell anybody when I was going to Phoenix over the Fourth to visit my mother. But everybody knew because I got a postcard that mentioned it, and Maxie or somebody picked up the mail that day.' If Mrs. Luna resented Maxie or somebody reading her postcard, it didn't show. Her expression was totally pleasant--someone explaining a peculiar, but perfectly natural, situation. 'And when Ellie made that trip to New York, and when Elliot went to Washington. Even if they don't mention it, you just get to know.' Mrs. Luna paused to sip her coffee. 'But usually they tell you,' she added. 'Something new to talk about.' At that she looked slightly abashed. She laughed. 'That's about all we have to do, you know. Speculate about one another. TV reception is so bad out here we have to be our own soap operas.'

'When was the trip to New York?' Leaphorn asked.

'Last month,' Mrs. Luna said. 'Ellie's travel agent in Farmington called and said the flight schedule had been changed. Somebody takes the message, so everybody knows about it.'

'Does anyone know why she went?' Leaphorn asked.

Mrs. Luna made a wry face. 'You win,' she said. 'I guess there are some secrets.'

'How about why Elliot went to Washington?' Leaphorn added. 'When was that?'

'No secret there,' Luna said. 'It was last month. A couple of days before Ellie left. He got a call from Washington, from his project director I think it was. Left a message. There was a meeting of people working on archaic migration patterns. He was supposed to attend.'

'Do you know if Ellie's going to New York had anything to do with her pots? Is that logical?'

'Just about everything she did had something to do with her pots,' Luna said. 'She was sort of obsessive about it.'

Mrs. Luna's expression turned defensive. 'Well now,' she said, 'Ellie was about ready to make a really important report. As least she thought so. And so do I. She pretty well had the proof that would connect a lot of those St. John Polychromes from the Chetro Ketl site with Wijiji and Kin Nahasbas. And more important

than all that, she was finding that this woman must have moved away from Chaco and was making pots somewhere else.'

'This woman?' Luna said, eyebrows raised. 'She tell you her potter was a woman?'

'Who else would do all that work?' Mrs. Luna got up, got the coffeepot, and offered all hands, including the children, a refill.

'She was excited, then?' Leaphorn asked. 'About something she'd found recently? Did she talk to you about it?'

'She was excited,' Mrs. Luna said. She looked at Luna with an expression Leaphorn read as reproach. 'I really do believe that she'd found something important. To everybody else those people are just a name. Anasazi. Not even their real name, of course. Just a Navajo word that means…' She glanced at Chee. 'Old Ones. Ancestors of our enemies. Something like that?'

'Close enough,' Chee said.

'But Ellie has identified a single human being in what has always just been statistics. An artist. Did you know that she'd arranged her pots chronologically… showing how her technique developed?'

The question was aimed at Luna. He shook his head.

'And it's very logical. You can see it. Even if you don't know much about pots, or glazing, or inscribing, or any of those decorative techniques.'

Luna seemed to have decided about then that his self-interest dictated a change in posture on this issue.

'She's done some really original work, Ellie has,' he said. 'Pretty well pinned down where this potter worked, up Chaco Wash at a little ruins we call Kin Nahasbas. She did that by establishing that a lot of pots made with this potter's technique had been broken there before they were fully baked in the kiln fire. Then she tied a bunch of pots dug up at Chetro Ketl and Wijiji to the identical personal techniques. Trade pots, you know. One kind swapped to people at Chetro Ketl and another sort to Wijiji. Both with this man's--this potter's peculiar decorating strokes. Hasn't been published yet, but I think she has it pinned.'

It gave Leaphorn a sense of deja vu, as if he remembered a graduate student over some supper in a dormitory at Tempe saying exactly these same words. The human animal's urge to know. To leave no mysteries. Here, to look through the dirt of a thousand years into the buried privacy of an Anasazi woman. 'To understand the human species,' his thesis chairman liked to say. 'To understand how we came to behave the way we do.' But finally it had seemed to Leaphorn he could understand this better among the living. It was the spring he'd met Emma. When the semester ended in May he'd left Arizona State and his graduate fellowship and his intentions of becoming Dr. Leaphorn, and joined the recruit class of the Navajo Tribal Police. And he and Emma…

Leaphorn noticed Chee watching him. He cleared his throat. Sipped coffee.

'Did you have any clear idea of what she was excited about?' Leaphorn asked. 'I mean just before she disappeared. We know she drove over to Bluff and talked to a man over there named Houk. Man who sometimes deals in pots. She asked him about a pot she'd seen advertised in an auction catalog. Wanted to know where it came from. Houk told us she was very intense about it. He told her how to get the documentation letter. Did she say why she was going to New York?'